


Mr. Right Next Door

by causeways



Category: Supernatural RPF
Genre: Harlequin, Jared is a teacher AU, M/M, Originally Posted on LiveJournal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-08-01
Updated: 2007-08-01
Packaged: 2019-01-07 01:44:14
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 29,039
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12223206
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/causeways/pseuds/causeways
Summary: Small-town middle school teacher Jared Padalecki had fallen for a criminal while on a cruise, without a clue who she really was. Now he was home, waiting for her to contact him again, and undercover cop Jensen Ackles' job was to track Padalecki's every move.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Written for spn_harlequin. 
> 
> Original prompt: _"Small-town elementary schoolteacher Kim Cassidy -- gorgeous and sweet -- had fallen for a crook while on a cruise, without a clue who he really was. Now she was home, waiting for her prince, and secret agent Nick Callahan's task was to track her every move. Watching a gorgeous blonde all day? No problem. But in small-town Georgia, hiding was impossible, and he and Kim became friends. Keeping the truth from this kind, pretty woman was getting harder. Then a kiss -- a passionate one -- complicated things even more. He would still protect her. The question was, from whom?"_
> 
> Everything I know about Pembroke, GA comes from city-data.com and from Mapquest. Bryan County Middle School does exist; however, I kind of fudged the dates of its school calendar, and the books Jared teaches are ones I read in my own middle school English classes.
> 
> Thanks to xtinethepirate, hesperblaze and psychochick_eva for beta, to aynslee for the read-through and for the advice, and a special thank-you to joosetta, without whose encouragement this fic wouldn't have been nearly as much fun to write as it was.
> 
> Russian translation available [here](http://kryssa.diary.ru/p209802882.htm). You'll need to have or create an account to access it.

Jared loved Saturdays. He and Chad usually went out on Friday nights, drank a few beers and played darts, and Sundays were always crack-down-and-catch-up-on-work days, but Saturdays, Jared got to relax. He usually slept in until nine or ten, which, considering he got up at five-thirty on school mornings, was really saying something. He'd make himself coffee, eggs and toast, and just hang out all day. Sometimes he, Chad and some other guys barbequed at night in the summer, but usually he just played some PS2 in the mornings and caught up on email.

On Saturday afternoons Jared called home, let his mom's voice wash over him while his dad just listened on, commenting occasionally. But mostly it was just his mom: _Are you sure you're getting enough sleep, JT? They aren't working you too hard?_

They'd had the same conversation so many times that Jared could recite his part of it without thinking, call and response, which was why it threw him so badly today when his mom got to the part where she asked, "So, you meet anybody yet?" and he realized his usual reply, "Come on, Mom, you know you and Megan are the only women for me," didn't fit. He thought about Sandy's tiny hands, how easily they'd slipped into his own; her smile, brightening when he caught her eye; her mouth pressed against his, urgent and wet, and he grinned at the memory of it.

"Actually," Jared said, "I have."

He'd gotten back from the Caribbean cruise, a Christmas present from his family, at two-thirty in the morning on Monday, less than six hours before he was supposed to be at school. He'd called home to let them know he was back, the cruise had been wonderful but he really needed to go to bed now, and he hadn't talked to them again until now. This week had been so busy he'd barely had time to sit down, let alone call home, so he still hadn't talked to them about the cruise.

"Way to go, JT!" his dad said. Jared could practically hear his parents smiling at each other.

"Well?" said his mom. "What's she like?"

Jared laughed. "Her name's Sandy. She's twenty-seven years old, likes long walks on the beach . . . "

"C'mon, now, none of that dating service crap," his mom interrupted. If Jared were at home, she would be swatting at him right now. "I mean, what's she _like_?"

Jared thought of Sandy's mouth against his ear. _Things are kind of complicated for me right now, Jared. I might not be able to see you for a while. But_ \-- her hands on his shoulders, warm brown eyes meeting his -- _I want this. I want you. I'll find you when I can._ Jared had slid his hands around her hips, pulled her in close, kissed her: _I know you will_ , he'd said. _I'll see you then._

"She's great, Mom," Jared said. "She's amazing. I think she's--" _The one_ , was how Jared meant to finish the sentence, _I think she's the one_ , but just then a pair of deafening yowls echoed through the house. Jared exhaled into the phone. "I think I need to go let Harley and Sadie out. They've been a real pain in the butt ever since I let Chad take care of them for the week."

"Bet he gave them milkbones every time they whined," his mom said knowingly.

"Bet you're right." Jared groaned. "I'll be right back." He put the phone down and headed towards the back door.

Harley and Sadie were really going at it, clawing at the back door. "What is _up_ with you guys?" Jared shook his head. "I'm never leaving Chad in charge of you again."

Which was an enormous lie. Chad was his best friend, he lived right across the street, and on top of that he genuinely _liked_ the dogs. Kristin claimed to, but Jared was pretty sure that Harley and Sadie actually scared the crap out of her and she was just saying that to be nice. He guessed he could always ask Eric, but it would feel kind of weird to ask his boss for that kind of favor.

Still, he really needed to talk to Chad about limiting the dogs' milkbone intake, because Harley and Sadie had been _insane_ this week. It took him a couple tries before he could shove the dogs far enough back to even open the door, and once he did they were off like shots. Jared grinned after them, shaking his head. Dogs were nuts.

Jared turned to go back into the house, but something caught his eye: the thing that had gotten the dogs so worked up. Just on the other side of the fence, in the backyard of the rental place next door that no one had lived in for the past six months, was a guy. He was wearing a gray t-shirt and a baseball cap, and at the sound of Harley and Sadie's approach he turned away from where he was dumping a full Hefty bag into the trash can.

"Sorry about that!" Jared called out, following the dogs into the yard. "They're friendly, I swear."

The guy smiled at Harley's attempt to lick him through the fence. "It's cool. I like dogs."

"Their names are Harley and Sadie," Jared said.

"Good to know," said the guy.

"So, you just move in?" Jared was close enough now that he could read the embroidery on the guy's baseball cap: _Rams Baseball_.

"Yeah," the guy said, scratching absently at the junction of his shoulder and his neck. "I just got the keys on Monday."

Jared wondered for a moment why he hadn't seen any moving trucks or noticed that the "For Rent" sign was gone -- but right, it had been the week from hell. "Well, welcome to the neighborhood, then," he said. "I'm Jared Padalecki. I, uh, live here."

The guy grinned. "So I gathered. I'm Jensen Ackles." He offered his hand over the fence, and Jared took it.

"Nice to meet you, Jensen," Jared said. Jensen's grip was firm, the sort of grip Jared's dad approved of, and only then did he remember: "Oh, shit, my parents are on the phone right now. I'd better be getting back to them."

"Yeah, you do that," Jensen said.

Jared turned back towards the house, but called back over his shoulder, "See you around, though?"

"I do live here now," Jensen replied with a smile, and Jared couldn't help grinning back.

When he got back inside and picked up the phone, Jared said, "I'm sorry that took so long. A new guy moved in next door, I was just saying hi."

"He seem like a good guy?" Jared's dad asked.

"Yeah," Jared said, smiling a little. "He does."

"So where were we before the dogs interrupted?" said Jared's mom. "Oh, you were going to tell us all about this girl of yours."

"Oh, right," Jared said, and got his head back into the conversation.

*

Jensen sank down on the couch and cursed himself for being an idiot. It wasn't like he'd really expected he'd _never_ meet Padalecki; he just hadn't thought it would be _now_ , while taking out the freaking trash. It was just that the week's worth of pizza boxes and Chinese take-out containers had been starting to stink, and Padalecki had been on the phone with his parents, a _cord_ phone, even, so it wasn't like it'd looked like he was going anywhere. Stupid overly curious dogs and their stupid sense of smell or hearing or whatever it'd been, and why couldn't Padalecki have just been thirty seconds slower at letting them out?

It wasn't really that big of a deal, and it wasn't like Jensen had been planning on never meeting Padalecki or anything. Considering that he was living next door in freaking Pembroke, Georgia, population 2,500, it would have been kind of hard not to run into Padalecki at some point. Jensen had just been caught off guard, was all. He'd done pretty well though, he thought.

Jensen walked over to the desk by the window and flipped open Padalecki's file. He'd already read it a dozen times. He had it practically memorized; it wasn't like he was going to find anything new in it now, but he read it again anyway.

Jared Tristan Padalecki. Born July 19th, 1982, which made him twenty-four years old. Born and raised in San Antonio, Texas. Straight-A student, soccer team, straight to UT with an academic scholarship. Majored in English, graduated with honors in 2004. Moved to rural Georgia straight out of college and got a job teaching English to at Bryan County Middle School.

Was given a ticket for a Royal Caribbean International cruise as a Christmas present from his family, for the dates of April 7-14, 2007. At a formal dinner on April 9th, 2007 he met Sandra McCoy, who was currently wanted in seven states and three foreign countries for cocaine trafficking and other related charges. Padalecki and McCoy spent most of the remainder of the cruise in each others' company. McCoy successfully evaded capture by the Drug Enforcement Agency for the entirety of the cruise, to the great embarrassment of all involved, but the agents were able to record a promise from McCoy to Padalecki that she would get in touch with him as soon as she could.

Which was why DEA Agent Jensen Ackles was sitting in a rental house in Pembroke, Georgia, listening to Padalecki extol the virtues of Sandra McCoy, cocaine trafficker, over the phone to his parents.

Before Jensen had ever arrived in Georgia, the agency had been fairly certain that Padalecki himself wasn't a criminal, just a civilian in the wrong place at the wrong time. After a week of recording Padalecki's phone calls and observing him, and especially after having met him, Jensen could pretty much officially confirm that. And from the way Padalecki spoke about McCoy, Jensen would be willing to bet a good deal of money that he had no idea who she really was. It was going to suck for the guy no matter how the whole thing with McCoy played out, Jensen couldn't help thinking. From what Jensen had seen of him, he seemed like a good guy. It was unfortunate that he'd gone and gotten himself involved with McCoy; if there was one thing Jensen had learned in the past five years with the DEA, it was that this sort of operation didn't usually work out so well for the bait.

*

Padalecki, Jensen quickly learned, was a creature of habit. He got up at five-thirty every morning during the week and went for a long, looping run. He came back, showered, got dressed and ate a big bowl of cereal, sometimes two. He left at seven-thirty and drove a beat-up Ford pick-up to Bryan County Middle School, where he taught three classes of seventh grade English and one class of eighth grade English. He stayed at school grading papers and giving extra English help until five-thirty, when he came home and cooked himself dinner. After that he watched some of whatever game was on, worked on more papers -- lesson plans, as far as Jensen could tell -- and went to bed by ten-thirty. Nine of the eleven days Jensen had been observing Padalecki had been school days, and in those nine days Padalecki had not deviated from his routine once.

Which was why Jensen was so surprised when he ran into him at the grocery store at four-fifteen on the second Friday afternoon of his assignment.

Jensen had finally decided it was time to start cooking for himself. In the whole time he'd been in Pembroke, McCoy hadn't so much as sent Padalecki an email. He had no idea how much longer this was going to go, and he could only order General Tsao's chicken so many times before he never wanted to see the stuff again. When he'd left for the grocery store, Padalecki had been in his office with three seventh graders and their grammar homework. It was just after four o'clock; there hadn't been a _chance_ Padalecki would get out of there for another hour. Jensen had been sure of it.

But here Padalecki was, in the middle of the produce aisle, and of course it was just Jensen's luck that Padalecki spotted him immediately. "Jensen! Hey!" he called, wheeling his shopping cart past the eggplants.

It didn't look like there was much chance of avoiding him, so Jensen stood his ground and waited for Padalecki to get closer than yelling distance. It didn't take long; about three strides and the guy could have been halfway across the grocery store, with legs as long as his.

"Hey!" Padalecki said again, and continued without waiting for Jensen to respond, "I feel like I haven't really seen you around this week. How've you been?"

"Uh, fine," Jensen said. "I've been kind of busy, I guess."

"Yeah, me too," Padalecki said. "Work's been kind of a bitch." He braced a little, leaned against the cart; Jensen watched the way the veins were raised on his arms, tan against the white of his shirtsleeves.

Jensen reached for a red pepper. It was the nearest thing, and it was something to do with his hands, something to distract Padalecki and let him get back to grocery shopping, but of course Jensen's luck wasn't going that way today.

"What are you making for dinner?" Padalecki asked curiously.

Jensen frowned. "I'm not really sure. Spaghetti, maybe?" He realized he was still holding onto the red pepper and put it in the cart.

Padalecki nodded. "Spaghetti's good. With meat sauce or something, right?"

"Uh, sure," Jensen said distractedly, picking up a prepackaged Caesar salad and sticking it in the part with the red pepper. He couldn't figure out why Padalecki cared what he was eating with his spaghetti. Jensen inched the cart a little further forwards. Padalecki moved with him. The guy was just like his damned dogs, that was it. Too curious about everything.

"I think I'm going to have steak," Padalecki said happily as Jensen put apples in the cart. He didn't even _like_ apples. "Porterhouse on the grill, maybe, and baked potatoes and salad, yeah, that'd be good. Hey man, do you want to eat steak with me?"

Jensen had been kind of tuning him out, so it was only after he'd replied, "Yeah, sure," that he realized Padalecki hadn't been asking him if he liked to eat baked potatoes and salad with his spaghetti. Shit. Jensen was about to backtrack, make up a story about being busy or something, because there was no universe in which this wasn't a bad idea, and he hadn't _meant_ to say yes; he'd been distracted, that was all.

But then Padalecki's face lit up. "Great! Oh man, it'll be awesome, we can grab some beers, too, and I've got a couple lawn chairs and it's nice out, we can hang out out back!"

Jensen had been right to compare the guy to a dog before: he couldn't think of a single thing that he could say to get out of this that wouldn't make him feeling like he was kicking a puppy in the stomach. And so Jensen found himself being dragged around Harvey's Supermarket in search of the perfect steak dinner fixings. Padalecki moved through the store with the ease of someone who'd been shopping there once a week for years -- which Padalecki probably _had_ , if he was as much of a creature of habit here as he was when it came to everything else.

The guy kept up a running commentary all the way from the baked goods over to the milk and cheese on the far side of the store, never so much as breaking stride to throw cereal, rice, meat, eggs, laundry detergent and everything else in the world into his cart. Jensen suspected that _he_ , on the other hand, was going to get home and discover that he'd bought nothing but salad and cereal. It was hard to concentrate on groceries while Padalecki was talking so goddamned much, and Jensen hadn't thought to write out a list or anything. He hadn't thought grocery shopping was going to be this difficult. Jesus.

Padalecki babbled all the way up to the checkout line and flirted with the cashier, who was good-looking and blonde. He even freaking introduced her to Jensen: "This is Tara! Tara, this is Jensen. He's my new next-door neighbor!"

Jesus Christ.

Tara smiled at him and said, "Nice to meet you," then turned right back to Padalecki and started chatting with him about somebody named Wade for a few minutes while Jensen just stood there gaping, because was Padalecki really this friendly with _everybody?_ People skills like this just weren't natural. Maybe the guy really was a criminal.

Jensen was being ridiculous.

"Wade's one of my seventh grade students," Padalecki explained once they'd finally gotten through the check-out line. "Tara's his aunt."

"Ah," Jensen said articulately. For some stupid reason that made him feel better, like maybe Padalecki's people skills weren't actually as superhuman as he'd thought they were. That didn't really make sense, even in his head.

"So you want to come over in forty-five minutes or so?" Padalecki asked in the parking lot. "Give me a little time to get the groceries put away and start the grill?"

"Yeah, sure," Jensen said.

Padalecki grinned huge. "Great! See you then, man!"

Jensen couldn't have stopped himself from smiling back if he'd tried. That would have been enough of a problem right there, if it weren't for the fact that he couldn't get his breathing regular until he was behind the wheel of his car again. He couldn't figure out _why_. It was just that Padalecki was a force of nature or something. When the guy turned his full attention on you, it was like seeing the sun rise for the first time after a week of solid rain, warm and brilliant.

And he'd thought he was being ridiculous _before_. Jensen shook his head hard, trying to get himself together, and drove back to the rental house.

*

After nearly two weeks of watching Padalecki move around his house in his sweatpants, grading papers and watching T.V., it was weird to walk straight up to the front door and ring the doorbell. The dogs got there well before Padalecki did; Jensen could hear them scrambling through the house and careening to a halt behind the door, trying to bark his ears off. Jensen could hear Padalecki's footsteps, then his voice, muffled through the door: "Just let me let Jensen in, darn it!" The door opened, and Padalecki was trying to hold the dogs back with one of his legs. He wasn't particularly successful. One of them made a wild leap for freedom and the other slipped under Padalecki's leg while he was distracted, crashing into Jensen. The crazy one got loose a couple of seconds later, and tried to push up against Jensen, too, jockeying for position.

"Sorry about that," Padalecki said sheepishly. "Uh, welcome to my house?"

It took a little while, but eventually the dogs let Jensen actually make it off the stoop and into the house. The dogs were a little crazy, but Jensen didn't really mind them.

He hadn't really been able to tell from the surveillance tapes, but the place actually looked a lot like Jensen's rental inside, except for the fact that it looked like someone actually lived here: pictures on the walls, rugs over hardwood floors and shoes stacked in a neat pile. It was almost enough to make Jensen feel guilty about his half-unpacked duffel bag and accumulating stacks of papers and AV equipment.

"I could give you the grand tour, if you want," Padalecki offered, but then his stomach growled. He looked down, corners of his mouth quirking to the side. "Or we could go ahead and get those steaks on the grill."

"You can give me the tour after dinner," Jensen said, smirking.

"Great! I'm freaking starving. The baked potatoes should be done in fifteen minutes, I put them in the oven right when I got back, so if we give it another few minutes we can put the steaks on, and there's salad in the fridge," and Jensen would've thought that the guy would have ruptured something by now, but clearly Padalecki didn't actually need to breathe. "Oh, and there's beer in the fridge," Padalecki added, "if you don't mind grabbing a couple."

"Sure." Jensen opened the fridge and damned if he didn't really like this guy: Padalecki stocked Corona. Jensen's mouth was watering a little. "Tell me you have limes."

"I've got limes," Padalecki said, reaching behind himself and lobbing one towards Jensen.

Jensen caught it neatly out of the air. "Cutting board and knife?"

"In that drawer and on the counter." Padalecki gestured.

Jensen cut the lime thin and popped the tops of the bottles, sticking a slice of lime in each. He handed one of the beers to Padalecki and picked up his own. "Cheers." He took a long pull and sighed happily. "Shit, that is good."

Padalecki's eyebrows shot upwards. "Wait a minute. You're not from _Texas_ , are you?"

Jensen had never really had much of an accent to begin with, but what accent he did have only tended to come out when he was very tired or drunk. Or, apparently, when faced with his first Corona with lime in a while.

Jensen took another sip of beer. "Yeah. Outside of Dallas. Richardson." He stared at Padalecki curiously.

"It was the look you gave that beer," Padalecki explained. "You only learn that kind of appreciation for beer in Texas."

There were plenty of DEA agents in L.A. who appreciated Corona with lime just fine, but Jensen didn't say so. "Gave me away, did it?"

Padalecki grinned toothily. "Sure did." He picked his beer up off the counter and said, "Hey, let's get those steaks going."

It turned out that Padalecki grilled a damned good steak. It also turned out that once you got a couple beers in him, Padalecki calmed right down and let Jensen get a few words in edgewise. And it was a good conversation, too, filled with easy banter. Jensen wasn't entirely sure how it happened but he found himself staying and helping to clean up the dishes, then moving out back to sit in the lawn chairs, drink another beer and shoot the shit. Dusk snuck past without him even noticing it, and it was a warm night, comfortable, crickets chirping in the dark. It wasn't until well after ten o'clock that Jensen looked at his watch and realized with a strange warmth in his stomach that, in the past five hours, he hadn't thought of the case. Not once.

*

Around seven on Saturday night, Jared went over to Chad's to watch the Orioles game. Jared usually tried to avoid spending time at Chad's house at all costs, since Chad kind of lived in squalor -- Jared was pretty sure that at least one of the times Sophia had broken up with Chad, it had been because of the state of his house -- but Chad had a flat-screen T.V. and had ordered pizza and, well, it turned out that Jared was easily persuaded.

The game was going pretty well so far, with Cleveland up three to one at the top of the fourth inning. Chad kept looking at him, though, all suspicious and squinty-eyed, and okay, the squinty-eyed part wasn't anything out of the ordinary, but the staring was a little weird. "What's going on?" Jared said finally.

"Sandy didn't call or anything did she?" Chad said out of nowhere.

Jared was usually very good at following Chad's sideways logic. Chad had been his best friend pretty much since the moment he'd moved to Georgia, and if Jared hadn't been fluent in Chad by this point, it would have been a long three years. But for the life of him he couldn't figure out where Chad had come up with that one.

Jared just stared at him and said, "If Sandy had called, you would have known about it right after she did. What makes you think she called?"

Chad drained his Miller Lite and crushed the can. "I dunno. You're acting all weird and jittery."

Jared's knee-jerk urge to deny it would have been more effective if he hadn't realized just then that his left leg had been involuntarily shaking for the past inning and a half. "Huh," he said.

"So there's really nothing up with you?" Chad asked.

Jared shook his head. "Not that I know of."

"Weird," Chad said. "Hey, speaking of weird, why weren't you at the bar last night?"

"Oh!" Jared perked up. "Sorry, I was going to come, but I ran into Jensen at the grocery store and we ended up grilling steaks and hanging out and you know Jensen, right? The guy who moved into the rental place next door?"

Chad considered. "I think I've seen him around, maybe. Kinda tall, likes to wear baseball caps?"

"Yeah, that's him. Anyway, we were still hanging out around eleven, and I was kind of tired and I'd already had a few beers, didn't really want to drive into town at that point. How was it, though?"

Chad groaned. "Sophia was there, man. She got there kind of late, after I'd already had a few beers, and I really shouldn't have even talked to her, but I couldn't help it!"

Jared had heard variations on this theme enough times that he could probably recite what had happened at the bar word for word. "What'd you say?"

Chad exhaled and muttered, "I bought her a beer and asked her to marry me."

Jared was trying his best to be a good friend, he really was, but he couldn't help himself, a little bit of laughter might have slipped out. "Dude, she broke up with you three weeks ago!"

"I know, all right?" Chad snapped. "I didn't mean to ask her but I just couldn't help myself!"

And now Jared was _really_ laughing, because when Chad went on the defensive he reminded Jared of a terrier with its back hair up, all disgruntled and yipping.

Chad scowled at him. "It's really not funny!"

"Yeah, I know, I'm sorry," Jared said, struggling to get himself under control and succeeding, barely. "So what'd Sophia say?"

"She said, 'Never in a million years', and threw her beer on me," Chad muttered to the T.V. screen, and Jared couldn't have stopped himself from laughing again if he'd tried. Which he didn't.

"Better luck next time, dude," Jared managed to get out through his wheezing. "Maybe the seventh time really is the charm." Really, that was one of Sophia's better rejections. Throwing the beer on Chad was classic.

"I really, really hate you," Chad said.

Jared grinned and Chad lobbed the empty Miller Lite can at his head. By the seventh inning stretch Jared had finally gotten the laughter more or less out of his system, and he went into the kitchen to get more beer.

"So Sandy really hasn't called you yet?" Chad said at the top of the eighth. "Because, like, you're still doing this whole weird overly happy thing."

"I'm always happy," Jared said. "Sophia _threw her beer on you_. I will never stop being happy."

"I still hate you," Chad informed him. "But really, you're sure nothing's up with you? You didn't, I don't know, get to throttle some annoying kid at work or something?"

Jared chucked the crushed-up can back at Chad. "Naw, they don't ever let you do that. I'm just in a good mood, is all."

And it was true, Jared realized, sinking back into the couch. It had been nearly two weeks and Sandy still hadn't called, and it should really be getting to him more than it was. No matter what he'd told himself about being patient, he'd spent the first week after the cruise thinking it was going to be Sandy every time the phone rang, and every time it had turned out to be someone else he'd had to swallow down a little disappointment. But now, for whatever reason, Jared didn't feel the same urgency about it as before. He was sure she was going to call, and he couldn't wait until she did, but he was doing just fine in the meantime, too.

*

Three weeks into the assignment, Jensen was really starting to wonder if McCoy was ever going to contact Padalecki at all. Padalecki didn't seem too worried about it, from what he'd been telling people over the phone -- _"She said she was going to need some time, and it's only been a few weeks"_ \-- but Jensen was starting to go a little stir-crazy. The job was always filled with long hours of grunt work and surveillance, only broken up by the occasional arrest or drug bust. He should have been used to it by now, but three weeks of sitting around in a house in the middle of nowhere, Georgia, was starting to get to him.

Part of the problem was that he hadn't been working out, Jensen knew. When he was in Los Angeles he usually went to the gym a few times a week to lift weights. He ran on the odd days and kept up with his judo, but when he was on surveillance cases working out made him nervous, like the case was going to break during that one hour or so he was gone. It wasn't likely, and especially with this particular assignment it wouldn't be that big of a deal; it wasn't like McCoy was going to call Padalecki thirty minutes before she showed up in Pembroke, so the DEA would have all the information they'd need to be able to capture her on the recordings, anyway. But Jensen still felt better devoting all of his attention to the case. The thing was, assignments like this didn't usually last so freaking long. If McCoy weren't one of the DEA's top priorities at the moment, there wasn't a chance in hell he'd still be here.

Three weeks in, Jensen broke. Padalecki went for an hour-long run every morning at five forty-five; it wasn't like he was going to be responding to any communications McCoy sent during that hour. Jensen decided to run then, too; if he kept it short enough that he got back before Padalecki did, it should be fine.

Jensen pulled on a t-shirt and shorts and laced up his running shoes. Padalecki ran the same route every morning, up Poplar Street towards Camelia Drive and back down in a long loop, so Jensen checked his watch and headed in the other direction. He figured he'd just run straight for twenty minutes and then turn back, which should give him plenty of time to get back to Pine Street before Padalecki did.

It was the beginning of May and a good morning for running, cool with a low-hanging fog. Jensen had missed this, the shock of the pavement beneath his sneakers and the slow-building burn in his legs, and the tension in his chest started to unfurl.

Five minutes into Jensen's run the road curved. The fog was thicker here, reducing the world to shadow and movement, but to the left up ahead was another road with a figure loping along it, taking long, easy strides--

Padalecki. Of course it was.

Jensen thought about turning back, but chances were that if he'd seen Padalecki, Padalecki had seen him, too. Dang it. Jensen really needed to stop making assumptions about Padalecki sticking to his daily routine; he was getting sick of those assumptions coming back to bite him in the ass.

Padalecki came up towards the intersection right about the same time Jensen did, and waved Jensen down. "Hey! I didn't know you ran." He slowed to match Jensen's stride.

"I haven't since I moved in," Jensen replied, picking up the pace a little and enjoying the strain of his muscles.

"It's a good habit to be in, though," Padalecki said, speeding up with him.

Padalecki didn't say anything after that. Jensen didn't think he'd ever heard Padalecki so quiet, but it was a good silence, one he didn't feel any compulsion to break. The houses on the streets were quiet, too; there was nothing to be heard but their footfalls on the pavement and their breathing in the cool morning air.

Padalecki led him along side streets, gradually turning to the left until they were back on Gorham Street, a few blocks down from their houses. "I usually pick up the pace for the end," Padalecki said. "You wanna race?"

There was no way in the world Jensen was going to back down from that kind of challenge. "You're on."

Padalecki grinned. "My driveway's the finish line. Start from that tree," he said, pointing. "Ready . . . go!"

Padalecki might have had freakishly long giraffe legs, but Jensen didn't like losing. Padalecki was ahead of him right up until Jensen put on a burst of speed to catch him at the very end. They gradually slowed down to a walk, then Padalecki stopped and bent over with his hands on his thighs. After a couple moments he looked up through his hair -- the guy really needed a haircut -- and said, "Hey, that was fun. You wanna do that again tomorrow?"

Jensen couldn't have said no if he'd tried.

 


	2. Chapter 2

After just a couple of days, it had already become a routine. Jensen would come outside at five-forty and Padalecki would be on the sidewalk in front of his house, stretching before they ran. Jensen would stretch a little, too, hamstrings and calves, and then they would take off. Jensen had been wrong about Padalecki's route, before: he _didn't_ go the same way every day; he just started off in the same direction. Sometimes they went straight down Bacon Street, where the deserted sidewalks seemed strange in the pale morning light; other days they headed towards the park, running shoes crunching along the gravel. Padalecki was a good pacesetter, pushing just a little harder than Jensen would have pushed himself, which made him the best kind of running partner. They raced at the end of every run, too. Padalecki beat him once, but not easily, and he was breathing even more heavily than usual afterwards, which made Jensen grin. It was nice to know Padalecki hadn't actually been letting him win this whole time.

They hung out a couple of times at night that week, too, watched part of whatever game was on and drank a beer or two. It was an easy week at work, Padalecki said. The seventh graders had just started reading _Of Mice and Men_ , so he didn't have as many essays to grade as usual, and Jensen could see the difference in the guy, the way he slouched more easily against the couch, huge hand curled around his beer, as opposed to the past few weeks when he'd spent most every night hunched over his desk grading essays at night. One of the cameras trained on Padalecki's house was trained on window of the computer room, and it had a good zoom lens: the book the seventh graders had read before _Of Mice and Men_ had been _The Old Man and the Sea_. The camera wasn't good enough for Jensen to have been able to see just what the seventh graders had had to say about Hemingway, but he had been able to tell that Padalecki had given out a lot of Bs.

Jensen had the vague sense that he should feel guilty about spending time with Padalecki like this, but he pushed the feeling down. Technically he was still keeping the guy's communications under surveillance, wasn't he? He was just doing it from a little closer in, that was all.

The thing was, Jensen genuinely liked hanging out with Padalecki. They got along well together, and Jensen couldn't remember the last time he'd spent so many days straight grinning just at the fact of being in someone's presence. It felt like making the varsity baseball team or the first time he'd cracked a DEA case, but somehow even _better_ , and if it this wasn't how he usually went about keeping someone's communications under surveillance, well, he tried not to think about it too hard.

It went on like that for a week or so, until Friday around noon Jensen's cell phone buzzed on his desk. Jensen scrambled to answer it, saw Padalecki's name flash across the screen and couldn't help but grin a little. "Yeah?"

"Hey man, it's Jared," Padalecki said. "Listen, what are you doing tonight, because some of the people I work with and I were thinking about going to Hart's, and I wanted to see if you wanted to come. Two dollar longnecks, man, and I think you'll really like these people, they're cool."

"Yeah, definitely," Jensen said unthinkingly into the phone. "What time?"

"Say, eight o'clock? I'll pick you up."

Jensen shook his head, amused. "You live right next door to me, dork."

"Yeah, I know, but my pick-up's totally cooler than your Honda," Padalecki replied.

"Hey!" Jensen said, outraged, but Padalecki just cackled into the phone and hung up.

It was a good thing McCoy didn't pick that afternoon to show up in Pembroke, because Jensen probably would have fucked up the whole case. He was jumpy all afternoon, like he'd drunk an extra pot of coffee, and all over nothing more than getting invited to go to a freaking two-dollar beer night at a bar. Maybe he was missing Mike and Tom and the rest of the DEA gang a little more than he'd thought he was, because he really didn't usually get this excited about the idea of cheap beer and shooting pool. Apparently four weeks away from L.A. was enough to make him regress to the age of thirteen and psyched about the chance of getting to hang out with the cool kids.

Jensen was outside a couple minutes before eight, just in time to watch Padalecki actually freaking pull his car out of the driveway and drive the thirty feet down the street to idle at Jensen's curbside. "You're ridiculous, dude," Jensen told him, getting in the passenger side.

Padalecki grinned, cocked his baseball cap at him. "You're welcome."

Jensen punched his arm and Padalecki drove off towards the bar.

Even at eight-fifteen, the place was already packed, but Padalecki pushed his way through the crowd with a combination of seeming to know everyone's first name and being freaking six-foot-five. Jensen followed him to a booth in the back where six people had wedged themselves in. They all flagged Padalecki down and started ragging on him: "Shit, Jared, what took you so long?"

"Sorry, guys," Padalecki said, beaming, "but I want you to meet somebody. This is my friend Jensen." He slung an arm around Jensen's shoulders and pulled him forward. "Jensen, this is Chris, he's one of the P.E. teachers, and this is Steve . . ."

Jensen was trying to pay attention to the names, he really was, but it was loud in the bar and warm, and he somehow even managed to miss the name of the cute blonde girl. Jensen thought it started with a K -- Katherine? Kirkland? -- and he was pretty sure Padalecki had said she was an algebra teacher, and she was smiling at him shyly, sitting on the end. "Hey, let's make room for Jensen, huh?" she said.

"What, not for me?" Padalecki pouted.

"Definitely not," another of the girls said. "We _know_ you."

"Hey!" Padalecki said, but he was grinning. "Hey Jensen, you want a beer?"

"Yeah, sure," Jensen said, sliding into the space next to the blonde girl. "I'll get yours next round."

"Sounds good to me," Padalecki replied, and headed towards the bar.

Jensen watched his retreating form for a moment, then turned to face maybe-Katherine.

"So, Jensen," she said, "you're Jared's friend?"

It was stupid, but Jensen had really liked Padalecki introducing him as his friend. Christ, he really had turned into a thirteen-year-old girl. "Yeah. I moved in next door to him a few weeks ago."

"Huh." She pushed a loose strand of hair behind her ear. "I wonder why he hasn't brought you around before. Keeping you all to himself, that's really not fair."

Jensen could feel the corner of his mouth trying to tug outward in a smile. "I'm sorry, I didn't catch your name before when, uh, Jared was introducing everybody." He'd almost called him _Padalecki_ ; he smiled sheepishly to cover the fumble.

"Oh! It's Kristen. Kristen Bell." She held out her hand and Jensen shook it. She had a good grip, for a girl, but Jensen couldn't help comparing Padalecki's handshake that first afternoon Jensen had met him. Padalecki's grip was better.

"Jensen Ackles," he said. "Nice to meet you."

Kristen smiled at him. "Likewise."

Bottles slammed down on the table beside Jensen and he started a little, turned to see Padalecki right beside him. "Beers for the table!" Padalecki said, handing Jensen one of the longnecks. He picked up one for himself and clinked it against Jensen's bottle, took a sip. Jensen watched his throat working.

"Cheers," said Kristen.

Jensen turned back around. He felt half like he should apologize to her, though for the life of him he couldn't figure out why. "Cheers," he said, and took another sip.

Jensen had been right in thinking that Kristen was an algebra teacher, as it turned out. She hadn't really planned on sticking with teaching after the first couple of years, but she'd discovered that she actually really liked forcing eighth graders to learn math, after all. She came from Michigan, had two dogs, two sisters, and no boyfriend, and she kept smiling at Jensen.

Padalecki had managed to squeeze in on the other side of the table and was in the middle of telling some story about one of his seventh graders. Jensen kept catching snatches of it over his conversation with Kristen: "And then, you're not going to believe this, Rick said his dog _ate the hard-drive out of the computer!_ "

Jensen laughed along with the rest of the table, even as Kristen quirked an eyebrow at him. "Are you even hearing a word I'm saying?" she asked good-naturedly.

"Yeah! Yeah," Jensen said quickly. "You were talking about your sister's dog. Go on."

Kristen pursed her lips. "Right. So anyway--"

"Jared! My man!" A scruffy blond guy butted up against Padalecki, threw his arm around his shoulders. "How you doing?"

Kristen rolled her eyes. "Chad," she said, and that was all the explanation Jensen needed.

"I've heard about all him," Jensen said, staring. Chad was wearing a white button-down shirt with the collar open and a gold chain around his neck, and had the kind of facial hair that looked like he'd been halfway through shaving then said, "Fuck it," and quit. From the way he was leaning against Padalecki, Jensen was willing to bet Chad was too drunk to stay upright otherwise.

"So what do you think, Jared?" Chad asked, spreading his arms wide. "Is tonight going to be the big night?"

"Oh God, not again," Kristen said quietly, smirking.

Jensen fielded a guess. "Proposal number seven?"

Kristen grinned. "Got it in one. You might be interested to know we have a pool for how long it takes before Sophia actually says yes."

Jensen took a long look at Chad. "Based on number of proposals or number of years?"

"Take your pick," Kristen said, sipping her beer. "The pool's up to a hundred bucks, if you want in on this."

"Let me think about it," Jensen said, watching Chad's head whip around and eyes narrow.

"She's here," Chad said to Padalecki in the loudest stage whisper Jensen had ever heard. "Sophia. Just walked in the door." Chad started struggling to get himself fully upright again, and Padalecki gave him a helpful push, watched him teeter through the crowd.

"I'd better make sure that fool doesn't do anything too embarrassing," Padalecki said to the table at large, sliding out of the booth.

Kristen laughed. "I'm not sure how there could be anything more embarrassing than getting rejected seven times in a row, but if anyone could come up with what it is, it'd be Chad."

Jensen smirked. "Impressive." It was hard to see just what was going on through the crowd, but Jensen caught sight of Padalecki's head and followed that trajectory down to a pretty brown-haired girl who was standing with her hands on her hips who looked like she couldn't decide whether to be disgusted or amused. From what little he'd seen of Chad, Jensen was pretty sure the correct response was _both._

Kristen watched along with him for a few minutes, but then she said, "Eh, it's not really different than it's been the first six times."

Jensen turned and stared at her. "Wait, you mean the last six times Chad proposed to her were _all in this bar?"_

Kristen grinned. "Yep. Just chock-full of class, ain't he?"

Jensen laughed. "No kidding." He tried to see if there was anything else going on, but the crowd had shifted now, obstructing his line of sight, and then there was a hand on his leg. Kristen's. Jensen swallowed and turned back to her.

"Hey," she said, smiling. "Do you maybe want to get out of here?"

Jensen took a long look at Kristen. She was pretty, for sure, tiny and blonde, and he'd liked talking to her. Her hand was warm on his leg and her smile was shy but open, and just like that he knew he was going to turn her down. He didn't have a single good reason for it, but something must have shown on his face, because she said, "Y'know, never mind, forget I asked," pulling her hand back.

Jensen stood up. He was all set up to apologize to her, to say he thought she was a great girl and he didn't know why he was acting like this, when Padalecki walked up behind him and slung an arm around Jensen's shoulders.

Jensen relaxed back into it automatically, and Kristen gave him the weirdest look, slow realization moving across her features. Jensen couldn't figure out what it was that she was thinking, what kind of realization she could be having. Then he turned a little, Padalecki's face came into his line of sight, and it clicked.

 _He wanted Padalecki_.

Jensen didn't know when it had happened or how but he wanted him, wanted to lean back into Padalecki's arm and for Padalecki to pull him in, wanted Padalecki naked and hard against him, bucking into Jensen's hand--

Jesus Christ, Jensen needed to get out of here.

Padalecki hadn't missed the sudden tension in Jensen's shoulders, though. "You okay?" he asked, voice full of concern.

"I'm fine," Jensen lied. "Just don't feel so good. I think it might be something I ate."

Padalecki peered into his eyes. "You want me to take you home?"

"No!" Jensen said quickly. "No, it's fine, I'll catch a cab."

Kristen was watching the whole exchange with entirely too much interest. "I can drive you, if you want, Jensen," she offered.

"It's cool, I'll take him. I live right next door to him, so it's not like it's out of the way or anything." Padalecki waved her off before Jensen could get a word in edgewise. "Come on, I'll take you home."

If Kristen raised an eyebrow at that, Jensen didn't notice. He'd done pretty well with the cover story; he really did feel like he might puke all over himself any time now. Catching sight of Sophia slapping Chad on the way out of the bar didn't even help.

The air outside the bar was cool and not so stale, which made things a little better, but then Jensen was alone in the pick-up truck with Padalecki and his ribcage felt too tight over his lungs, obstructing his breath.

"If you need me to pull over or anything so you can throw up, just let me know," Padalecki said, eyeing him with concern.

"I will," Jensen replied, rolling down the window and hoping that Padalecki hadn't noticed he was trying to keep as far away from him on the bench seat as possible.

Padalecki didn't say anything else for the rest of the ride home, for which Jensen was grateful. Once he pulled up in front of Jensen's house, though, he said, "Do you want me to come in, make sure you're okay?"

"No!" Jensen said, too quickly. "I mean, no, it's probably just a stomach bug or something, should be fine if I sleep it off. Don't worry about it."

"You sure?" Padalecki said.

"Yeah, I'm sure." Jensen got out of the car. "Thanks for the ride."

"No problem," Padalecki replied. "And hey, I'll check in around ten tomorrow morning, make sure you're not dead in there, okay?"

"Yeah, okay, sure," Jensen said, because coming up with a reason not to was too much work and if he didn't get away from Padalecki right now he was going to go insane.

"Good night!" Padalecki called after Jensen as he walked up the path.

" _Fuck_ ," Jensen muttered to the front door. "Fuck, fuck, _fuck_."

He should have figured this out before, Jensen thought as he let himself into his house. He should have known that there was something weird about how damned _happy_ he'd been to be around Padalecki all the time, but he hadn't figured it out, might not ever have if Kristen hadn't done it first, and now that he'd figured it out he didn't know what to do with himself. Jensen needed to _do_ something, get out of his own head, go on a run so fast and long that he couldn't think about anything but the pain in his muscles by the time he was done, but he couldn't do it. He'd told Padalecki something was up with his stomach, and it would be just his luck for Padalecki to be watching his house, make sure that Jensen wasn't trying to sneak out or something.

Watching Jensen's house. Jesus, that was rich, and didn't that just make the whole thing better? Jensen was supposed to be keeping Padalecki's communications under surveillance so that when his cocaine-trafficker girlfriend showed up, the DEA could come in and make the capture -- and Jensen had really gone and gotten himself into a big fucking mess with this one. He'd been able to convince himself it was okay when he'd thought he just wanted to be Padalecki's friend, thought it wasn't that big of a deal, that he could back off at any time, but this was a whole different ballpark. Because yeah, he'd known he liked Padalecki, but he hadn't had any idea he'd _liked_ him -- and then Kristen fucking Bell had to go figuring it all out, making it seem like it was something so goddamned obvious. Had it really been that obvious? Who else knew? Did _Padalecki_ know?

No way. Jensen could decide that one right away. No freaking way Padalecki knew. Padalecki had just been acting the same way he always had around Jensen, and there was no chance he'd be keeping that up if he knew. He must not have seen Kristen's face, or not made the connection between that and Jensen's sudden bullshit sickness, but anyway it didn't matter. Padalecki didn't know what had happened and Jensen was going to keep it that way.

Just in case Padalecki actually was trying to keep an eye on him, Jensen drew the blinds on Padalecki's side of the house before he turned off the lights and kicked off his shoes. Fuck, he really needed to go on that run. He laid down on the living room carpet and did a bunch of sit-ups, but that just wasn't cutting it. He was idly entertaining thoughts of sneaking out the back door and through the yard of the house that butted up against his before he realized that that was almost more ridiculous than the rest of this.

Jensen gave up after the third set of fifty sit-ups and tried to go to sleep, but he couldn't. He kept replaying the stupid scene in his mind: him knowing he was going to turn Kristen down but not knowing why, Padalecki's arm around his shoulders, the look sliding across Kristen's face . . . Fuck. Jensen was hard, and he couldn't do a damned thing about it. He didn't want to think about what image he'd have in his head when he came.

*

Jensen waited as long as he could stand it the next morning, and then he called his boss. "It's a good thing I'm already up at six a.m. or I'd be ripping you a new one," Jeffrey Dean Morgan said by way of greeting. "What's going on, Jensen?"

Jensen didn't bother talking his way around it. "I don't think I should be on this case anymore."

He could practically hear Jeff sitting up straighter over the phone. "You don't think _what?_ "

Jensen repeated himself. "It's been nearly a month, Jeff. Do you really think that McCoy's going to contact Padalecki now if she hasn't yet?"

"She's one of the agency's top priorities at the moment," Jeff reminded him.

"Yeah, I know," Jensen said. "But don't you think she would have made a move by now if she was going to?"

"This isn't about McCoy, is it?" Jeff said slowly. "You want out for some other reason."

"Yes," Jensen said, then caught himself, frustrated. "No. Look, Jeff, is there anyone else you could possibly have trade places with me? As a personal favor?"

"Are you going to tell me just why you need out of there so badly if I say yes?"

"No," Jensen said.

"Then the answer's no. Look, Jensen, I know the lead's crap, but it's the only one we've got on McCoy right now. You're one of the best in the agency with this kind of work, and you're the one I want on the front line if she shows. It's as simple as that. Whatever this thing is that's got you wanting out of there, it's not going to affect the case, is it?" Jeff didn't wait for a reply. "Good. Then whatever it is, work through it."

Jensen ground his teeth together, said, "Yes, sir," and hung up the phone. " _Fuck_."

If he'd thought about it, he would have known Jeff wasn't going to just let him get out of this case so easily. _No questions asked_ was pretty much the polar opposite of DEA policy in general and Jeffrey Dean Morgan policy in particular. And the real bitch of it was, Jeff was right. Jensen couldn't get out of the case if what was going on wasn't something that was going to directly affect the case, and this wasn't.

God damn it. This wasn't something that should have been a problem in the first place. So Jensen had met Padalecki, sure. That was fine. That had just been pure chance. The second time hadn't been entirely Jensen's fault, either, in the grocery store, but everything that came after it had been, starting from the moment he forgot to pay attention and ended up grilling those freaking steaks at Padalecki's house.

Jensen was responsible for everything from that moment on out. He hadn't meant to say yes to Padalecki's dinner offer, but he hadn't tried to get himself out of it, either. He hadn't tried to take the same route that Padalecki ran, but when he'd seen Padalecki running down that side street Jensen hadn't pretended not to see him, hadn't turned around, hadn't dissuaded Padalecki from running with him. He could have said he didn't like to run with other people, that he only ever ran alone. He could have said that, but he hadn't, and the thought of not running with Padalecki again those other mornings hadn't so much as crossed his mind.

This was supposed to be a surveillance case. It was a tiny town, sure, and Padalecki was living in the house next door, but this wasn't the kind of undercover job where Jensen was supposed to get friendly with the locals. If he'd just said hi to Padalecki once or twice, that would have been fine, but he was supposed to be hanging back, keeping an eye on things, not getting all caught up in it. Jensen was supposed to be more professional than this.

The fact that Jensen had been thinking of himself as being _friends_ with Padalecki would have been plenty unprofessional enough, but then it had gone further. And then there was the whole other side to this, the one Jensen had been doing his best not to think about: Padalecki was a _guy_.

If Padalecki had been a woman, this whole scenario wouldn't have been any less unprofessional -- but things never would have gotten to this point if Padalecki had been a woman. Jensen would have recognized the way he grinned stupidly every time Padalecki was around, would have realized what the tightness in his chest when Padalecki invited him over to watch T.V. and drink a couple beers had meant. This wasn't the first time he'd ever liked someone; he knew the signs, but this was the first time the signs had ever pointed at someone who had a dick, and fuck, he was tailspinning, couldn't figure out what to do with himself.

So of course that's when the doorbell rang. Jensen's stomach did a slow roll, because there wasn't anybody else in this town who'd be coming to his door at nine-thirty on a Saturday morning, and really wasn't that just his luck? Jensen needed about five more hours before he could deal with seeing Padalecki again, or maybe days, or maybe he could just drop the case and flee the country; that sounded all right, too. He wondered for about thirty seconds if Padalecki would go away if he just didn't answer, but then Padalecki started knocking and called, voice muffled through the door, "Jensen, I know you're awake, I saw you walking around in there!"

_Damn._

Jensen was still trying to figure out if there was some way he could get away with not answering when Padalecki yelled, "I just want to see if you're feeling better." There was real worry coloring his voice, and Jensen felt like a tool.

Jensen swallowed, walked up to the door and turned the bolt. He'd be fine, seeing Padalecki again. It would be like pulling a Band-Aid off quickly, a sharp pain, and then he'd be done with it, could get used to the idea of Padalecki again, could start figuring out how he was going to get over whatever this was. He opened the door.

"Hey man," Padalecki said, smiling a little, and fuck, he was on Jensen's doorstep, too big to be real, messy hair and laughter lines and dimples. Jensen's skin felt too tight for his body, the corners of his mouth were tugging outwards into a smile already and it wasn't like pulling a Band-Aid off at all because it just didn't _stop_. Jensen was fucked, completely fucked. He couldn't get his tongue to do anything but rest heavy in his mouth, couldn't form words.

Padalecki gave him a long look. "You look like shit, dude," he said finally, and that broke the moment, made Jensen laugh a little, the nervousness bubbling up and out.

"Yeah, sorry," Jensen said, moving to the side and leaning against the door. "I didn't get much sleep last night."

Padalecki nodded in sympathy. "Puking or what?"

"Yeah," Jensen lied. "Look, I'm pretty wiped, I was thinking I might head back to bed, try to get some rest--"

"Oh, sorry, sure," Padalecki said, shifting backwards. "I just saw you were up, wanted to make sure you were okay and all."

"No, I appreciate it, man, thanks," Jensen said quickly. His nerves were still firing, the urge to reach out and pull Padalecki closer was strong, and he needed Padalecki to leave, needed him to leave _right now_.

"Give me a call if you need anything, okay?" Padalecki said, turning and stepping away from the door.

"Sure," Jensen said, and it came out funny, the word half-caught in his throat, but Padalecki didn't seem to notice. He turned his head and waved again as he cut across Jensen's yard, and Jensen smiled at him, then went back into the house, closed the door and slumped against the wall. Jesus Christ. He had a boner the size of Russia and he wasn't even sure when he'd popped it, but either way Padalecki didn't seem to have noticed anything and that right there was a goddamned miracle.

But the fact remained that Jensen was hard because of Padalecki, blindingly hard, and something needed to be done about it. He still couldn't believe he'd let himself get blindsided by the whole thing like this. He'd thought seeing Padalecki again might help, might help him get a little perspective on the whole thing, but instead Padalecki's presence had only made it worse. That made the solution easy enough: he'd just have to stay away from Padalecki. He could do that. If he just stopped thinking about Padalecki entirely, didn't see him, didn't hang out with him, everything would be fine.

For about four minutes, that seemed like it might work, until Jensen remembered one thing: he couldn't keep from watching Padalecki. Keeping Padalecki under surveillance was his job.

Jensen was so fucked.

*

The rest of the day sucked. If it'd been a weekday, Padalecki would have been out of the house forcing middle schoolers to read until dinnertime, but since it was Saturday the guy was around for the whole damned day. Jensen wasn't going to watch Padalecki. He wasn't, but Padalecki was _there_ and Jensen couldn't help it: Padalecki just kept walking past the windows where Jensen could see him, and the rest of the time Jensen could see him on the surveillance cameras. So Jensen had to spend the whole day watching Padalecki cook himself breakfast, watching Padalecki answer emails, watching Padalecki talk on the phone with his parents. Padalecki mentioned him in passing -- "You remember my next-door-neighbor, Jensen? Yeah, he got sick last night, really didn't look so good this morning." -- and something turned in Jensen's gut at the way his name rolled off of Padalecki's tongue, the syllables thick with Texas.

To make things worse, Jensen had been hard all day long. It had sucked, but he'd made it this far, and he might have made it through the rest of the day, too, if it hadn't been for Padalecki's goddamned dogs.

Around two-thirty in the afternoon, after Padalecki got off the phone with his parents, the dogs started whining and would not shut up. It was making Jensen insane, hearing it over the audio, which meant it had to be a billion times worse up close. Padalecki was trying to watch something on T.V.; the angle was kind of bad, but Jensen was pretty sure it was Pimp My Ride, and if things weren't so fucked up right now Jensen would have planned on giving him hell for that one. The dogs were rubbing up against Padalecki, picking up toys and dropping them on his lap, the whole while keeping up the most annoying high-pitched whining Jensen had ever heard, peppered with a few barks. Even after thirty seconds of hearing it over the microphone, Jensen was seriously beginning to consider hitting the mute button, but Padalecki lasted nearly ten minutes before he groaned, "Fine! Fine. I'll play fetch with your dumb asses." He stood up and stretched, his t-shirt riding up and exposing a strip of skin. Jensen's cock twitched with interest.

It turned out Padalecki's brand of fetch involved less standing still and throwing a tennis ball and more keeping the tennis ball in his hand and letting the dogs chase him around the yard, tackle him to the ground and steal the ball. Padalecki was in good shape, but it was the beginning of May now and warm outside, and by the time the dogs finally lost interest in playing fetch Padalecki was sweating through his shirt. He left the dogs in the yard and went back into the house, walked down the hall and out of the line of sight of Jensen's camera, then stopped right in front of the window facing towards Jensen's house and pulled off his shirt.

Padalecki wasn't doing it on purpose, Jensen knew that; he wasn't even facing towards the window. But however it happened Padalecki paused right there in front of the window, and Jensen watched him in profile as he curled his fingers under the edges of his shirt, pulled it up and over his head. Jensen watched the play of sunlight on Padalecki's side, watched his stomach muscles contract, watched the line of his jaw emerging from the shirt, and before he could think about what he was doing, Jensen ground the heel of his hand down on his cock.

He groaned at the pressure of it but it wasn't enough, not nearly enough, and he fumbled with the zipper of his jeans and shoved his hand down his boxers. It felt like he'd been hard for a year and Padalecki was half-naked thirty feet away and Jensen couldn't take it anymore, a few pulls and a flick of his wrist and he was coming so hard he nearly knocked himself out on one of the LCD monitors, a sticky mess all over his hand and his jeans.

By the time Jensen recovered enough higher brain function to look back over there, Padalecki had moved away from the window, and only then did everything really register. Jensen had just jerked off to the sight of Padalecki shirtless, had just done it without even thinking about it, and _fuck_ , he was screwed.

 


	3. Chapter 3

For the life of him Jared couldn't have said why he was awake at five-thirty on Sunday morning. He usually got up pretty early on Sundays so that he didn't hate the world so much at five-thirty on Monday, but not this early. For whatever reason, though, he was completely awake now, so he just rolled with it, got out of bed and headed towards the kitchen to make some coffee. He didn't even really need the coffee; he was plenty alert as it was, but the force of habit had him heading out of his bedroom and past the office, about to turn left into the kitchen, but before he made the turn something caught in the corner of his eye. He went over to the office window, looked outside and saw Jensen jogging down the street.

Jared didn't even think about it. He just went back into his room, pulled on a pair of basketball shorts and a t-shirt and laced up his running shoes by the door, then headed after Jensen.

It was cooler this morning than it'd been lately, but Jensen had enough of a head start that Jared had broken a sweat pretty quickly trying to catch with him. When Jared got to the intersection of Poplar and Garrison he wasn't sure which way Jensen had headed, but on a hunch he hung a right. He figured Jensen would be more likely to take a straight shot route when he was running by himself, and sure enough, he was right: after a few more minutes he recognized Jensen's form a couple blocks ahead of him. Jared put on a burst of speed to catch up.

"Hey," he called once he was a few feet away from Jensen, and Jensen jumped like he'd seen an honest-to-God ghost.

"Jesus fucking Christ," Jensen swore, turning his head as Jared ran up beside him. "Are you trying to give me a heart attack or something?"

"You didn't hear me running up behind you?" Jared asked, matching Jensen's stride.

Jensen scowled. "No. I was kind of distracted."

"Having a moment with the pavement, huh?" Jared cracked, but Jensen's face was weirdly blank, eyes fixed straight ahead of him.

"Yeah, something like that. Hey, what are you doing up, anyway? I didn't think you ran on Sundays."

Jared pushed the hair off his forehead. "I do sometimes, just not so early in the morning. Why didn't you tell me you were going to go this morning? I wouldn't have had to chase your ass halfway down Garrison. Oh, hey, I guess you're feeling better then, yeah?"

"Yeah, I'm good on that," Jensen replied.

There was something weird about the way he said it, something Jared couldn't put his finger on just then. Jensen was quiet for the rest of the run and he beat Jared easily when they raced to the finish. "You only won because I had to sprint to catch up earlier," Jared said. It should have gotten a smile out of Jensen, would have any other day, and Jared couldn't figure out why the fuck Jensen's mouth just barely quirked to the side instead before he said, "See you around," and headed back into his house, leaving Jared alone and confused.

It hit Jared midway through the morning, what had been weird about Jensen's reply earlier. _I'm good on that_ , he'd said. Not _I'm good_. He'd said, _I'm good on that_ , like there was something else he _wasn't_ good on, and whatever it was, Jensen wasn't telling him about it.

That was fine. Whatever it was, it was Jensen's business, and Jared wasn't going to go prying into it. Jared told himself that, and he really meant to follow with it, except that a couple of days later, Jensen was still acting weird. On Monday morning he'd stumbled out of his house five minutes later than usual for their run, and Jared had the feeling that Jensen had almost decided not to come running at all. They didn't always talk when they ran, but they talked often enough that it wasn't out of the ordinary when one of them made a comment or cracked a joke, but every time Jared opened his mouth on Monday it felt like he was hitting a wall, Jensen replying with nothing but a monosyllable "uh-huh" or a "yeah, sure."

Tuesday morning wasn't any better. After Tuesday's run he turned to Jensen and said, on impulse, "Hey, what are you doing tonight, man? You want to come over to my place and watch some T.V. after dinner?"

Jensen frowned and said, "Sorry, I can't, I've got a lot of stuff I've got to do tonight," which didn't ring true, seeing as Jared was pretty darned sure that computer programmers who worked out of the home could set their own hours.

But Jared just replied, "That's cool, another night, then."

Jensen nodded. "Yeah, sure. See you later," he said and headed inside. That was another thing that was weird: usually they stretched on the sidewalk for a few minutes after they ran, talked a little while Jared tried to see just how late he could push it before he had to go shower and eat or else be late for work, but these past few days it seemed like Jensen couldn't get back inside his house fast enough.

Wednesday's run wasn't any better, and afterwards, when Jared tried asking Jensen again if he wanted to come over and watch T.V. after dinner, Jensen gave him the same bullshit answer -- "Sorry, it's just kind of a crappy time for work right now, maybe later." -- and Jared wanted to reach out and grab Jensen, make Jensen tell him what the fuck was going on, but he chickened out at the last minute, let Jensen head up the sidewalk and disappear into the house again.

Now that Jensen had turned him down the second day in a row, it was kind of hard not to think that whatever was going on with Jensen was somehow Jared's fault. Jensen wouldn't be acting like this around him if Jared hadn't done something, would he? The thing was, he couldn't figure out what he could have possibly done that would be making Jensen act like this, like he was just putting on the front of being friends with Jared instead of them actually _being_ friends. And Jared wouldn't have expected it before this had happened, but he actually _missed_ Jensen. He missed hanging out with him and watching baseball or bad T.V. He missed Jensen laughing at his lame jokes while they went on their runs. He missed being friends with the guy, and whatever had happened to make them not be friends anymore, he needed to find out what it was.

Thursday morning was the first truly hot morning of the summer, the air heavy with humidity even a little before six a.m. Jared was leading Jensen on the long circuit route, the one that looped through the park, and Jensen was as unreadable as ever, running beside him. Jared slowed a little once they got into the park, took one of the smaller paths instead of the main one, slowed even further as they ran down it until he was barely even jogging as they passed the pond. Jensen just slowed right down with him, didn't so much as question it until finally Jared was flat out walking. Only then did Jensen say, "Hey, what're we doing?"

Jensen wasn't even looking at Jared when he said it, and somehow that set Jared off, made him step right in front of Jensen and stop him from moving forward. "Dude, what are you doing?" Jensen repeated. There was an odd edge to his voice that Jared couldn't place.

And Jared had thought through how he wanted this conversation to go, how he was going to phrase things so Jensen wouldn't shut down on him, but now that he was here he couldn't remember a single thing he'd planned on saying. Instead he said, "What are _you_ doing?"

"I don't know what you're talking about," Jensen said, looking anywhere but at Jared's face.

"Yeah, you do," Jared replied, putting his hands on Jensen's shoulders. Jensen tried to shrug him off but Jared didn't let him. "Look at me. What's going on with you lately?"

"Nothing," Jensen insisted.

"Bullshit," Jared shot back, leaning towards him. "Will you at least freaking look me in the eye? I just can't figure you out lately. I thought we were getting pretty tight, and then you start acting all weird on me, like you don't really want to be around me at all, and I don't get it, Jensen. I just want you to fucking tell me what's going on with--"

 _\--you_ , was how that sentence was supposed to end, but Jared never got that last word out, because Jensen grabbed him by the back of the head and kissed him, hard and unhesitating. Jared opened his mouth a little, surprised, and Jensen's tongue flicked along Jared's teeth. Jensen curled his fingers around Jared's skull and his stubble rasped against Jared's cheek, and Jared's mind was a blank, taking in sensation but putting out no thought until Jensen pushed back, eyes flaring wide. The park was quiet but for their panting and a few snatches of birdsong, and Jensen was looking anywhere but at him.

"There," Jensen said roughly. "You happy?"

Jared was reeling, too many thoughts firing at once, but apparently Jensen wasn't waiting for a response: he turned and jogged back the way they'd come, footfalls heavy on gravel, and Jared didn't try to follow him.

*

It wasn't until Jared got back to the house that he really thought about what had happened. He kicked off his shoes and headed in to shower and that was when it hit him: Jensen had _kissed_ him. Jared had just wanted to figure out what was going on with the guy, and okay, maybe he'd pushed a little harder than he should have after four days of not making Jensen talk about it at all, but he hadn't had any idea that Jensen was going to react like that. Jared hadn't seen the kiss coming at all, and it was messing with him. A guy didn't ordinarily go kissing his friends out of nowhere, did he? Jared tried to imagine what it would have been like if the same thing had happened with Chad, but he couldn't even get his mind to the point where Chad started to reach for him before he started laughing. It was just that nothing like that could have ever happened with Chad; there was no way. They weren't that kind of friends.

But he and Jensen _were_? Jared didn't know. Jensen was straight, though, right? For sure he was straight. Maybe Jared had never asked him directly, but they'd definitely talked about how hot Jessica Biel was at least twice. So okay, maybe that was a bad example, because Jared was reasonably sure that most of the straight women he knew would renounce all men for Jessica Biel -- she was hot enough to trump all gender preference -- but even if Jensen wasn't straight, he had to know Jared was, right? Because Jared was in love with Sandy, and she was a woman, and Jared was straight, for sure, and Jensen knew that he was in love with Sandy--

Except that Jensen didn't know, Jared realized all of a sudden. He didn't know Jared was in love with Sandy because in the entire time that Jared had known Jensen, Jared hadn't mentioned her. Not once.

That was weird, wasn't it? He'd known Jensen for a month, had gone running with him every morning for the past two weeks and hung out with him besides, and Jared had never once mentioned the woman he was hoping to marry. That was definitely weird.

*

Jared was having trouble keeping his mind on work. That was never a good thing when you were working with over-filled classes of twelve and thirteen-year-olds, but they weren't doing anything too complicated today, just going over the quizzes he'd given last Friday, so he could have gotten through that just fine. But people were asking him what was going on when he was in the teachers' lounge during breaks, and he panicked a little, couldn't help wondering if _Jensen kissed me this morning_ was written in big letters on his forehead, and his stomach did a slow-roll at the thought.

"You all right there, Jared?" Kristen asked during their shared free period, going to fill the coffee pot from the water cooler. Jared had been monopolizing it for the past fifteen minutes, filling his Nalgene and emptying it, and he hadn't really thought about how that could seem a little odd until now.

"Yeah, I'm good, just thirsty," he told her.

Kristen raised an eyebrow. "Just thirsty?"

"Yep," Jared said, smiling. "I'm a growing boy, need to keep hydrated."

"Good God, I hope not," she replied with a grin and headed over to the coffee machine. She wasn't acting any differently than usual, but Jared couldn't stop himself from thinking that she'd been able to look at him and just _know_.

Jared made it through the rest of the day somehow, but it didn't get any better after he was home. It was just -- Jensen lived _right next door_ , and he couldn't stop thinking about it, replay of the kiss running over and over: the way Jensen had grabbed him and pulled his head down, the feel of Jensen's tongue sliding into his mouth, the press of Jensen's chest against his. It had been a good kiss, he thought suddenly, and that thought freaked him out more than the rest of it. But now that he'd thought it he couldn't stop thinking it. Jensen had kissed him and he'd _liked_ it, and if he hadn't been confused enough about this whole thing before, that went ahead and pushed it right over the line.

Jared was straight. It hadn't ever been a question; it had just been something he'd always known, the same way he knew his name and where he lived and what size shoes he wore. It was just a fact, nothing he'd ever had to think about. He'd always liked girls, always liked the idea of them and the reality of them, too, small in his arms. Jared wasn't against the _idea_ of being gay; it was just that _he_ wasn't.

But he didn't like lying to himself, either: Jensen had kissed him, and Jared had liked it. Jensen was a guy. Those were the facts, and Jared didn't know what to do with them, because really, wasn't twenty-four a little old to start wondering if he liked guys? Wouldn't he have had some idea that this was a possibility?

He hadn't, though. That was the thing. He'd never thought of a guy in this context, and he didn't even know how to start dealing with it.

*

It wasn't any better in the morning, either. Jared got up at the usual time and had already put on his shoes and gone outside before he woke all the way up and remembered what had happened on yesterday morning's run. Most of him wanted to go back inside immediately, but part of him wanted to wait, stand his ground until Jensen showed up, try to figure out how they were going to go from here. He hadn't seen Jensen since it had happened, and he needed to; he couldn't figure out what was going on here by himself. So he stood outside and waited, but by six o'clock Jensen still hadn't showed, and if Jared was going to get a run in at all, he needed to go. One last hamstring stretch and he took off, and he could have sworn he saw a shape moving behind Jensen's front window.

*

It had been three days and Jared still hadn't seen Jensen again, not once. Jensen hadn't been showing up for their morning runs, even though Jared had waited for him ten minutes later than usual every day. Neither of them had tried to call the other, and Jared hadn't so much as seen the guy opening his door to pick up the paper in the morning or heading out back to take out the trash at night. Jared had missed Jensen last week, when Jensen had been sick and then busy, but that hadn't been anything like this, purposeful avoidance--

Except that it had been. It had been exactly like this, Jared realized suddenly, except that he hadn't known what was going on. Jensen had been trying to avoid him, and Jared had let him get away with it for a while, but then he'd pushed, and Jensen had kissed him, and the reason Jensen had been trying to avoid him was because Jensen wanted him. Jared was right about this, he had to be. It was the only thing that made sense. So he'd been right, hadn't he? It _had_ been Jared's fault that Jensen had been avoiding him.

Jensen hadn't been acting weird around him before last week, though, hadn't been given any sign that he wanted Jared. It was something new, then. Jared thought back, tried to figure out what could have prompted it, if he could pin it down. When had Jensen started acting weird around him? Last Sunday, he thought. Last Sunday, the morning after he'd gotten whatever stomach bug he'd had at the bar. Maybe Jensen had caught some kind of crazy virus that had made him kiss Jared, Jared thought, something that had made him want Jared; but no, Jared was pretty much certain that homosexuality wasn't actually catching.

Jared didn't know when it had started, and the whole thing was just throwing him for a loop, that was all. He missed being friends with Jensen, missed how easy it had been to hang out with him, missed the way it had felt like they'd been friends for years already, but now that all this had happened, he didn't have any idea if he was ever going to get that back.

*

The Monday night after the whole mess started, Jared was over at Chad's house, playing Madden on Chad's PS2. Jared was really supposed to be grading his eighth graders' _Julius Caesar_ essays, but after an hour of all the words blurring together into nonsense he'd given up and called Chad. They'd ordered pizza and Jared had drunk too much Mountain Dew and it was better than grading essays, for sure.

"Dude, you are scary good at this game tonight," Chad said after Jared scored his fifth touchdown in a row. "You sure you haven't been practicing or anything?"

"How would I have been practicing when I don't _have_ Madden?" Jared asked, finishing his third Mountain Dew.

"I don't know, but if you don't quit with the soda you're going to be insane in a couple hours and I have no problem throwing your caffeine-high ass right out on the curb." Chad stuck his tongue out in concentration, angling for a first down throw; Jared's team intercepted it easily.

"I'm good on the soda." Jared grinned. "You're just pissed because you're losing."

"No, I'm pissed because you don't ever concentrate this hard on Madden," Chad said. "You usually at least give me a freaking chance, but it's like this is your personal battle against the world today. What's going on with you?"

Jared couldn't do anything but stare for a minute. Only Chad would be able to figure out that something was wrong because of how badly Jared was beating him at a PS2 game. "Nothing," he said, shaking his head a little and turning back to the game. He should be able to get a fifteen-yard-gain at least on this next play, better if Chad was distracted.

Chad hit the pause button. "Talk to me here, dude. You're a sucky liar."

Jared rested his controller on his knee, leaned forward and said, "Nothing's going on. Can I finish kicking your ass now?"

Chad just kept staring at him, and it was unnerving, almost to the point that Jared wanted to spill his guts just to get him to stop. Just when Jared was really starting to think about it, though, Chad said, "It's got something to do with Sandy, doesn't it?"

"Sandy," Jared repeated. Her name sounded strange to him, like he wasn't used to hearing it. But then when was the last time he'd heard her name? When was the last time he'd said it? Jared had no idea. He'd thought about her recently, sure, but it wasn't anything like it had been when he'd first gotten back from the cruise.

Back then, he hadn't been able to get her out of his head, had thought about her all the time. He'd been crazy about her. He'd been able to call up the line of her hips, the curve of her smile in an instant. He could still do it, but it took him a moment. Now, he had to think about her consciously, didn't catch himself daydreaming about her all the time, and that was weird, wasn't it? Sure, it had been a while since the cruise, but when he'd met her he'd been so certain that she was the one. A month and a half shouldn't have been long enough for him to start to forget about her, but if he couldn't recall everything about her immediately, wasn't that just what he was doing?

"I've got to go," Jared said abruptly. Chad gave him a strange look, but Jared ignored it, grabbed his stuff and headed home.

*

Jared couldn't fall asleep that night, no matter how hard he tried. Around midnight he gave the eighth grade essays another try in a last-ditch effort to put himself to sleep, but even that didn't work. He just couldn't stop thinking about Sandy -- about how he _hadn't_ been thinking about her. A month and a half ago, he'd said goodbye to her at the end of the cruise. She'd promised him she would contact him as soon as she could and he'd said he would wait as long as it took, and he'd meant it, too. He'd known that she was the one, so it didn't matter how long it was going to take; if she was the one, he was more than willing to wait for her.

Jared had been so sure that Sandy was _it_ , but if that were really true, then why was it so hard to call her whole image up in his mind? He could think of fragments of her, her hip, her cheek, but he couldn't get her whole face to stick in his mind at once. She was the one, he told himself, and he'd known it; he'd been sure of it for so long. But if she really were the one, why did he have to keep reminding himself of it?

*

Tuesday was another hot morning, so humid that it felt like moving through a steam bath. The A.C. had turned off in the middle of the night and the stickiness in the house was making Jared lethargic, enough that he considered just going back to bed and sleeping for another hour, but the force of habit made him pull on his running shoes and head outside at five-thirty as always. Maybe he'd cut the run short this morning, drink his coffee slowly, actually read the paper instead of just skimming it, and Jensen was standing on the sidewalk in front of Jared's house.

It had been the better part of a week and suddenly Jensen was there again, stretching his arms like nothing had changed. "Hey," Jared said, his mouth gone dry.

"Hey," Jensen said, smiling a little sheepishly. "I just wanted to say I'm sorry. For what happened. I didn't mean to -- look, it's stupid, I just wanted to see if we could start running together again."

"Yeah," Jared said, swallowing. "Yeah, of course, man. You didn't ever have to stop, you know."

Jensen fidgeted. "Yeah, I know. It's just -- this is really awkward, isn't it?"

"Yeah," Jared agreed, laughing a little. "Yeah, it is."

Jensen's mouth turned down at the edges. "I just want this to stop being awkward," he said. "D'you think we could maybe, I don't know. Pretend that whole thing never happened?"

Jared looked at Jensen for a long moment -- the hunched line of his shoulders, the cautious hope on his face -- and he didn't know he was making a decision until he'd already done it, until he was stepping forward and saying, "No, I don't think so."

He put his hands on Jensen's shoulders again and Jensen looked up at him wonderingly. "Jared?"

"Hey," Jared said quietly, then leaned forward, pressed his mouth against Jensen's, slowly; Jensen could move away if he wanted to. They stood unmoving for a moment, mouths touching and Jensen's shoulders tense beneath Jared's hands. Jensen didn't kiss back, and the moment stretched until he was convinced Jensen was going to pull back. Jared swallowed and began to shift back, just a bit, but Jensen moved with him, pressed his mouth against Jared's again and flicked out his tongue to catch Jared's bottom lip and Jared hesitantly reached his tongue out to meet Jensen's. Jensen let out a frustrated noise and pulled Jared flush against him and somehow Jared had a hand on Jensen's neck.

Jensen pulled back far enough to whisper, " _Fuck_ ," against Jared's mouth.

Jared smiled, kissed him again. "Yeah," he agreed, touching his fingers to Jensen's ear, his neck.

Finally, finally Jensen pulled back, rested his forehead against Jared's. "We should go inside. I mean," he opened his eyes, "we're not going running right now, are we?"

"I don't think so," Jared said, out of control grinning and he never wanted to stop.

They pushed through the door to Jared's house, and Jared scrambled to shut the door as Jensen backed him against the wall, hands on his jaw. Their hips collided, one of Jensen's legs slid between Jared's and Jared felt like all of his nerve endings were firing at once. Jensen slid his mouth down the side of Jared's jaw, around to suck at the place where his jaw met his neck, and Jared arched forward against him. Jared's thigh pressed against the hard line of Jensen's cock and it threw him for a second, long enough that Jensen pulled back. "Hey," he said, face full of concern. "You okay?'

Jared couldn't stop staring at Jensen's mouth, wet and full from kissing. He'd just gotten thrown off for a moment, that was all. He wanted Jensen, actually _wanted_ him; even just thinking about it made a thrill move through his gut. "Yeah," Jared said, "yeah," and kissed him again, ran his tongue along the edge of Jensen's teeth and bucked up against him, smiled at Jensen's hiss when their cocks touched.

It was good, it was better than good; Jensen was grinding him into the wall and then Jensen groaned, shoved a hand between their bodies and palmed Jared's cock and Jared bit out a, " _Fuck_ ," and came in his shorts.

Jensen was still kissing him, grinning against his mouth, and Jared might have been boneless, post-orgasmic, but he knew about reciprocity. He slid his hand past the elastic of Jensen's running shorts and it was about the hottest thing ever, the way Jensen hissed and arched into Jared's hand and bit down on Jared's shoulder when he came.

They didn't move for long minutes afterwards, just stood there panting into each others' mouths, and Jared pretty much never wanted to move again, unless it was to the bed and only then if he knew they wouldn't have to move for a damned long time. But he did have to move; it was a Tuesday morning. Jared exhaled against Jensen's mouth and murmured, "I've got to get ready for work."

Jensen stepped back a little but Jared held him by the arms and added, "I don't want to go," just to make sure Jensen was clear.

The side of Jensen's mouth tugged downwards, wryly. "You should probably take a shower and stuff. Can't really go to work looking like this, can you?"

"Well, you can," Jared said, "but they generally try to discourage it." Jensen grinned and Jared opened his mouth again before he really thought about it. "Hey, are you going to be around tonight when I get back? Around six? I was thinking we could maybe eat some dinner and, y'know. Do stuff."

There was a long moment in which Jensen didn't say anything, and Jared was certain he was going to say no. Jensen was going to say he'd realized the whole thing was a mistake and now things were even more fucked up, and Jared was an idiot who shouldn't have pushed so hard so fast. Jensen had said he wanted them to be friends and _fuck_ , Jared hadn't even realized he wanted this thing until half an hour ago, and it was too much and--

"Yeah," Jensen said. "That'd be good," and he was grinning and Jared was grinning too, kissing him and everything was fine.

*

It wasn't until after he'd watched Padalecki get in his pick-up and take off for work that Jensen started to panic. He didn't really figure out that that was what was happening until later, but even before Padalecki had turned off of the street Jensen's hands were a little shaky. They'd done this, actually done it. Padalecki had kissed him and pushed him up against the wall and gotten him off, and God, Jensen had spent the past five days being miserable, incapable of not thinking about it, but thinking about it was a whole different thing than actually _getting_ it, and he was panicking. He couldn't even really distill down just what it was that he was panicking about: the fact that Padalecki wanted him back? The fact that he'd actually gotten what he wanted? The fact that he'd just had sex with a guy? It was too much all at once, and it was making Jensen itchy in his skin, wired like he'd drunk a couple buckets of coffee, and there wasn't anywhere for all the energy to go.

Jensen nearly called Jeff again around noon, to try to get transferred. He got halfway through dialing before he hung up, because really, what did he think he was going to say to Jeff?

Jensen didn't know. He didn't have a freaking clue. By three o'clock he'd lost count of how many push-ups he did; once he got out of the triple digits Jensen had a tendency to get sidetracked by the straining of his muscles, and that was good, that was what he was looking for. Finally he quit, drank about a gallon of water and took a cold shower and concentrated on the itch of sweat sliding off his back.

 _Dinner around six_ , Padalecki had said, and Jensen had agreed to it. He'd just gotten off; he would have agreed to _anything_ , but he was pretty sure that this was the worst idea in the world and he needed to be in another state before Padalecki got back from work. Possibly in another country.

By five-thirty Jensen was climbing-the-walls nervous. He didn't know if Padalecki was going to come over to his place or if Jensen was meant to go over there; he didn't know anything about the rules of this, and he'd nearly called Jeff another three times before reminding himself of how very hard Jeff would chew him out if he did. He'd already put all of his surveillance equipment on safe mode, still recording but not displaying anything that'd give him away. It was fucked up that he had to think about that sort of thing before Jared could come over. It was fucked up that he was in this situation to _begin_ with, but he was in it, all right, no doubt about that.

Jensen had been trying to get ready for it, but when his doorbell rang at five forty-five he still started like a gun-shy animal. It was too soon for Padalecki to be here. He'd said six, and Jensen needed those extra fifteen minutes, needed an extra fifteen _years_. But he went to the door anyway, didn't even bother looking through the peephole before opening it.

"Hey," Padalecki said. He was wearing khakis and brown leather loafers and was sweating through his white button down shirt, and want curled thick in Jensen's gut.

Jensen swallowed. "Hey yourself. You haven't been home yet, have you?"

Stupid question; Jensen would have known immediately if he had, but Padalecki's mouth just twitched outwards. "No. I came straight over here. Left the forty-seven essays I have to grade tonight in the car, even."

"Dude, if you've got that much stuff to grade, what are you doing over here?" The bottom dropped out of Jensen's stomach even as he said it, but he pressed on: "You should do that, don't want to get behind on--"

"Do you really not get it?" Padalecki interrupted, amusement barely covering some stronger emotion on his face. Before Jensen could figure out what it was Padalecki was backing him into the hallway, knocking the door closed behind him. It was just like this morning except Jensen's heart was pounding even louder in his ears, and he had to wonder at this, how knowing what was coming could make him want it even more. Padalecki slid his hands around Jensen's back, pulled him in.

"You were freaking out, weren't you?" Padalecki said. "You thought I changed my mind, was going to come back over here and tell you I'd made a mistake, didn't want this."

That was it; that was it exactly. That was what had made him want to call Jeff again, want to try to get out of here; that was why he'd spent the whole day itchy in his skin. He hadn't even really thought about it, because thinking about it would have made it more real, but that was just what had been wrong with him. Jensen didn't trust himself to look at Padalecki, didn't trust himself to say anything.

"Hey," Padalecki said quietly. "Look at me."

Jensen did, reluctantly.

"I didn't change my mind. God, Jensen, do you have any idea? All day today, I couldn't stop thinking about you. Look, I've never done this with a guy before--"

"Me neither," Jensen cut in.

Padalecki was still talking. "--but look, Jensen, I want -- God. I _want_ this, all right? I want to do this with you. You've got tell me this is all right, though, man, you've got to tell me I'm not alone in this--"

Jensen kissed him. He couldn't have stopped himself if he wanted to. Jensen kissed him and Padalecki pressed him against the wall, fumbled with Jensen's zipper. "You gotta tell me if you want me to stop," Padalecki said roughly against Jensen's jaw.

"You kidding me?" Jensen panted. "I'll fucking kill you if you stop."

Padalecki grinned and bit down on Jensen's neck. A few more strokes and Jensen was going to collapse onto the floor, and Padalecki must have guessed it. "Bedroom?" he asked, pulling his hand out of Jensen's pants.

"Yeah," Jensen said, adrenaline spiking so hard he stumbled a little when Padalecki moved away. "God, yeah."

It sounded like the best idea in the world, and it was, except somewhere around the door to the bedroom Jensen slowed down. It was just -- kissing on the street and fumbling in the hall were one thing, but a bed was something else, made this a whole different kind of real. Jensen wanted this, God, he was achingly hard and his tongue was heavy in his mouth, but still he hesitated until he felt Padalecki's hand on the small of his back, Padalecki's mouth moving against his neck.

"Hey," Padalecki said quietly. "We don't have to do this, you know. We can stop."

And that was just what Jensen needed to hear. "No," he said, "I don't want to stop," and he pulled Padalecki into the room, sat down on the edge of the bed and fumbled with the buttons on Padalecki's shirt. They were too freaking many of them, and they were small, too; Jensen was impatient and his hands were trembling. Padalecki pushed Jensen's hands away and finished the rest of the buttons while Jensen went for his belt, pulling it fast out of the belt loops and getting Padalecki's zipper undone.

Padalecki shrugged his shirt off and shucked his pants; besides the t-shirt and boxers he still had on his socks. He should have looked ridiculous but somehow he didn't, urging Jensen to raise his arms and pulling Jensen's t-shirt off. Jensen's jeans were halfway off already, his cock tenting his boxers, and he lifted his hips to let Padalecki tug his jeans the rest of the way off, and then Padalecki was pushing him backwards onto the bed and following him down, sprawling all over Jensen.

Padalecki's cock was moving against his hip. There was nothing between them but boxers, and Jensen shifted underneath him to get their cocks to line up, hissed at the contact as Padalecki ground down onto him. It was nothing like that morning; it was _better_ than that morning, Padalecki staring at him as they moved together, looking about as startled at Jensen felt. Jensen didn't know what he'd expected but God, he hadn't thought it would be anything like this, hadn't known it would be this good.

His orgasm built so quickly he didn't even realize he was going to come until he was shooting in his boxers, clenching his eyes shut, and Padalecki kissed him, then, licked his mouth open and groaned and came.

Padalecki didn't move for a long moment afterwards, just stayed sprawled all over Jensen. Jensen was too blissed-out to try to move him, but finally he got himself together enough to realize that the come was cooling in their boxers and it was going to be pretty damned gross if they didn't do something about it. "Dude," Jensen said, "you gotta move, my legs are falling asleep."

Padalecki kissed him, sleepy-eyed. "Don't want to move," he said. He rolled off of Jensen and wrinkled his nose at the sight of their boxers. "I haven't come in my pants since, oh wait, this morning."

Jensen threw an arm out to hit him, but somehow just ended up with his arm across Padalecki's chest instead and Padalecki staring down at it with something bordering on wonder, the same look he'd had when he was about to come. "Jensen," he exhaled. "God."

Padalecki didn't even need to say more, because Jensen felt the same way. He propped himself up on his side and kissed Padalecki again, slowly and thoroughly until Jensen couldn't breathe. Padalecki opened his eyes slowly as he pulled back and smiled a little regretfully. "I should go," he said, and Jensen's stomach hitched a little. It must have shown in his face, because Padalecki kissed him again and said, "Seventh grade essays, remember?" and Jensen couldn't stop the relief moving through him.

"Fucking kids," Jensen said.

"Yeah, I know," Padalecki said, mouth twitching. "Trying to educate them, what a crappy idea." He rolled off the side of the bed and stood up slowly, then gave his boxers a rueful glance. "I probably don't want to try to head back home just wearing these, do I?" he mused.

"Probably not," Jensen agreed, and then promptly lost all higher brain function when Padalecki pulled the boxers off. Because yeah, he'd had Padalecki's cock in his hand, but he hadn't seen Padalecki completely naked before, and Jensen couldn't stop staring the line of his back, the way his cock hung down between his legs when he bent over to pick up his pants.

Halfway through pulling the pants on, Padalecki looked up and grinned at him. "Busted," he sing-songed.

Jensen flushed but didn't look away. "Yeah, well, do you blame me?"

"Nah, not at all," Padalecki said, pulling his t-shirt back on. "I mean, I'll be the first to admit, it's a pretty awesome view."

Padalecki turned and Jensen stood up, kissed him again, slid his hands up Padalecki's back. " _God,_ " Padalecki breathed out. "I've got to go, Jensen, really."

Jensen stepped back, scratched at his neck. "Yeah. Yeah, I know."

Padalecki paused in collecting the rest of his stuff, strewn across the room. "Running tomorrow morning, though, yeah?"

"Yeah, for sure," Jensen said automatically.

"Awesome," Padalecki said, dimples flashing, and left.

Fifteen minutes later, as he exited the shower, Jensen caught sight of himself in the mirror. He was still grinning.

 


	4. Chapter 4

They went on a run the next morning. Everything was back to normal, except that Jensen couldn't stop glancing at Padalecki. He was flushed from running, shaggy hair sticking to his forehead; occasionally he'd push it back and it would stick up crazily for a few seconds before falling back down into his eyes again. Jensen half-wanted to tell him to just give it up, but then he'd catch Padalecki looking at him, too, and Jensen's stomach would roll with want. It was like being thirteen again, kid with a crush, and Jensen didn't know how they made it to the end of the run.

The moment they got back they headed for Padalecki's bedroom, pulling off t-shirts and shoving down shorts. Jensen was hard already -- it was only with real effort that he'd survived the run without popping a boner -- and he got even harder as Padalecki's mouth opened over his. He reached for Padalecki's cock, grinned at the way it swelled in his grip, but then Padalecki batted his hand away. Jensen stared at him for a moment, confused, until Padalecki said raggedly, "Hey, Jensen. I wanna -- can I suck you?"

"Oh God," Jensen said, balls clenching at the thought as he sat back on the edge of the bed. "Are you sure?"

It was the stupidest question ever, Jensen thought immediately after he asked it; if someone was offering you a blowjob and you wanted it, there was no reason in the world to second-guess it, but Padalecki just let out a nervous little laugh and said, "God. God, yes," and went to his knees.

Jensen could have come from the sight of that alone, Padalecki looking up at him through his fringe, brown eyes hot with want. Then he slid Jensen's boxers all the way down, curled a huge hand around the base of Jensen's cock and sucked the head into his mouth. " _Jesus fuck_ ," Jensen exhaled, and Padalecki grinned around him, then without warning sucked Jensen's cock almost all the way into his mouth.

Padalecki had never done this before; Jensen could tell from the occasional scrape of teeth against the underside of his cock. He had good instincts and a huge mouth, though, and Jensen wasn't going to last for more than a couple of minutes of this, especially now that Padalecki had found a rhythm, twisting Jensen's cock and sucking him in time. He slid back a little to lick the head and Jensen couldn't take it anymore. "Jared," he said. "Jared, I'm gonna--"

But he didn't pull off. He just looked up at Jensen through his bangs again, locked eyes and that was it. Jensen groaned and came down Jared's throat and Jared swallowed it down, never taking his eyes off Jensen's face and God, Jensen was done for. Jared pulled off and licked his lips clean as Jensen sank back onto the bed. Jared stretched out beside him, languid like Jensen was feeling, and kissed Jensen full on the mouth. It should have been weird to taste himself on Jared's tongue, but it wasn't at all, and Jared was practically radiating pleasure.

It took Jensen a moment of lounging on the bed to realize: "I never got you off."

"Uh, you don't need to worry about that," Jared said, flushing. "I, uh. Might've come a couple seconds after you did." He gestured down at his stomach, sticky with semen.

"Huh," Jensen managed.

"This is starting to get a little ridiculous," Jared said, kissing him. "I don't think I've ever come without anyone touching me before."

Jensen smirked at him and then sucked on his neck. A few minutes of kissing and Jensen was already getting hard again. "Speaking of things that are ridiculous," Jensen muttered. He hadn't had that kind of recovery time since he was sixteen.

Jared grinned at him, then said quickly, "Shit, Jensen, we've got to stop. I have to leave for work in fifteen minutes."

Jensen sat up reluctantly. "Guess you'd better be getting on that, then."

Jared bit his lip. "Yeah, guess so. Damn."

"You could call in sick," Jensen suggested.

Jared considered it for a second, then frowned. "No, I can't. But it's a good thought." He kissed Jensen breathless, then said, "You gonna be around tonight?"

"Nah, I was thinking I'd head to Canada," Jensen deadpanned. "I hear Vancouver's nice this time of year. I'll be back in a couple months or so."

"Shut up, you." Jared swatted at him. _Jared_. Not Padalecki, _Jared_ , and Jensen hadn't even noticed the switch in his thoughts until just now. Jensen stared at him, slack-jawed, and tried to get himself back together.

"You okay there?" He was looking at Jensen, brown eyes soft and mouth twitching a little to the side in concern.

Jensen swallowed. "Yeah. Yeah, Jared, I'm good." Thinking of Jared as Padalecki had been his last defense, his last attempt to convince himself that he wasn't in too deep here, that he could have still backed out if he wanted to, but there wasn't much point in lying to himself. He _was_ in too deep, and he _couldn't_ stop this, not now. He couldn't and anyway, he didn't want to. He liked the way Jared's name tasted on his tongue.

Jared grinned at him, and said, "Awesome." He kissed Jensen again and said, "See you tonight?"

"Yeah," Jensen replied, letting himself out the door. _Jared_ , he thought again, experimentally. It should have felt wrong; it should have felt like anything other than what it was. Instead, it felt like he should have given into this ages ago. It felt like the best idea he'd ever had.

*

It was a good thing, him and Jared, and it just kept getting better. Jensen couldn't help marveling at the fact that they'd managed not to fuck this up after all. If he let himself think about it for too long, it still freaked him out a little that he was doing this with a guy, but then he'd remember that it was _Jared_ , and it didn't matter that he was a guy. Jensen had never felt like this about anyone, not even Danneel, and he'd spent the better part of two years convinced that he was going to marry her. Jared was a guy, but he was _Jared_ , and that trumped everything else, made it all moot.

He and Jared had a new routine now, and Jensen was convinced that their previous routine had just been leading up to this: running in the morning, handjobs afterwards or blowjobs. Jared's cock was huge, but they discovered that Jensen had an astonishing lack of gag reflex, which worked out just fine for all involved. Jared went to school after that, and waiting for him to get back kind of sucked, but it was worth it, always. In the evening they got each other off slowly, made each other scream when they came, or they spent hours making out while whatever game was on T.V. played in the background.

They spent most of the weekend in bed. Jared tried to bring his eighth graders' essays over to grade one night, but that didn't work out so well; Jensen was too busy sucking bruises onto his neck to let Jared concentrate on grading.

Jared always left at some point in the night, before it got too late, because he always had schoolwork he needed to keep up with. Much as Jensen wanted to keep him from doing it, Jared was serious about his job, Jensen could tell, and Jensen got that, so he always let him go without complaining too much.

That was their routine, and it was a good one. It was working out just fine for them, until one night about a week in, when Jared showed up at Jensen's door and said, "Tomorrow's a no-school day."

He was grinning uncontrollably as he said it, pulling Jensen's shirt over his head and kissing Jensen's neck, and Jensen wasn't complaining. He just had the feeling he was missing something, which so wasn't his fault; it was to concentrate on anything but the way Jared's teeth were grazing against his skin. "A no-school day?" he echoed.

"As in, I don't have to go to work tomorrow. As in, I don't have anything I have to do tonight other than hang out with you," Jared explained rapidly, and now Jensen was getting with the program.

"You don't have anything you have to, I don't know, correct or write up or anything?"

"Nope," Jared said cheerfully, dipping his head and licking a circle around one of Jensen's nipples. Jensen arched into the touch. "I don't have anything I've got to do at all. I could sleep in until noon, if I wanted to."

"That's," Jensen hissed as Jared nibbled a little, "helpful."

"Yep," Jared agreed as he rolled Jensen's other nipple to hardness between his fingers. He was damned good at that. Jensen suspected that if he put his mind to it, Jared could make him come through nothing but the slow agonizing roll of his fingers.

Jensen was beginning to be a little afraid that Jared really _was_ planning on spending the rest of the night playing with Jensen's nipples. Which was an awesome idea, except for the fact that Jensen was pretty sure he was going to spontaneously combust if Jared kept this up for a few more _seconds_ , let alone the rest of the night.

"Jared," he began, trying to cut that plan off at the pass, because, y'know, he loved foreplay, but actual _play_ was nice sometimes, too, except Jared interrupted him.

"I was thinking," Jared said slowly, still twisting Jensen's nipple between his fingers. "I was thinking we could try something."

Jensen hadn't realized it before, but he got it now: playing with his nipples had been Jared's way of stalling. He had to hand it to the guy; it was an effective tactic.

"You want to try something?" he repeated back.

"Yeah," Jared said, swallowing, looking nervous all of the sudden, and then he just straight-up said it: "I was thinking you could fuck me."

Complete silence, and there wasn't enough air in the room. "Fuck you," Jensen repeated, swallowing hard. "You want me to--"

"Yeah," Jared said, his voice ragged. "God, yeah. You have no idea, do you, Jensen? After all this, you still--"

"I still what?"

Jared met his gaze. "You still think I'm going to change my mind, that I don't want all of this. Well, I do. Just so we're clear. I want you, Jensen. I want _this_. I want you in me."

He never stopped staring at Jensen as he said it, and Jensen couldn't do anything but kiss him, couldn't think of any way he could possibly reply. Finally he said, "I know," and then, "Thanks," because yeah, he'd known it before, had known Jared wanted it, but it was good to hear it, good not to have to doubt.

Jensen kissed him and Jared kissed back. It felt comfortable, their tongues sliding together, felt like something Jensen could get used to. It felt like something permanent.

Then Jared pulled back and said, "When I said I wanted you to fuck me, did you think I meant sometime? _Now_ , Jensen." Jensen laid his hands on Jared's chest, and now felt like something else entirely. Jared's pulse was rapid beneath Jensen's hands but he was looking at him unflinchingly, eyes hot.

"Okay," Jensen said, remembering how to breathe. "Okay."

Jared took him by the arm, tugged him over to the bed and pulled him down. Jared laid down on his stomach beside him and spread his legs a little.

Jensen's breath hitched. He couldn't stop staring at the curve of Jared's ass. "Jared," he said wonderingly, tracing his fingers along the edge of Jared's shoulder blade.

"Hey," Jared said, twisting to kiss Jensen's mouth open. "It's okay. It's gonna be okay."

Jared's face was open, emotions laid bare, and Jensen knew that he was right. They were going to be fine.

Jensen swallowed. "Have you got stuff?"

"In the drawer of the nightstand," Jared said, gesturing.

Jensen rolled and opened the drawer. Inside were a box of condoms and a half-used tube of KY-Jelly. _Half-used_ registered with him a moment later, and what that had to mean. Jensen turned back to Jared and held up the tube. "Did you . . . "

Jared bit his bottom lip and looked up at Jensen through his bangs. "I was curious."

 _Curious_. Jesus Christ. Precome was already leaking out the tip of Jensen's cock at the thought. Jared was going to kill him if he kept this up. "Well, shit. You'll have to tell me what to do, then." He uncapped the lube and slicked it onto the fingers of his right hand.

Jared's eyes widened. "I think you've got the idea already." He spread his legs wider and said, "C'mon, Jensen, just do it, you're killing me with all this -- _Jesus fuck_."

It turned out that sticking a finger up his ass shut Jared right up. That was good to know. "You were saying?" Jensen smirked a little.

"God." Jared shifted his hips.

"Hey, you okay?" Jensen asked, working his finger in a slow circle and watching it disappear into Jared's ass.

" _Okay,_ fuck," Jared bit out. "Come on, I can take another."

Jensen groaned. He slid a second finger in and scissored them wide. Jared was panting and rocking back against him and Jensen didn't trust himself to be able to hold off much longer.

"Jared, I've gotta--"

"Yeah," Jared interrupted. "Fuck, yeah. Do it, Jensen."

Jensen tore the condom wrapper open with his teeth and rolled the condom on. He gripped hard at the base of his cock, trying to maintain some kind of control, and slicked himself up.

"Come on, Jensen," Jared said, and Jensen did. He stretched out along the length of Jared' back and braced with his left hand, lined himself up with his right and began to press in. _Fuck_ , it was tight, and Jared was rigid beneath him.

"You okay?" Jensen asked.

"Yeah, just give me a sec," Jared ground out. Jensen felt Jared force himself to relax. "Okay. Okay, I'm good."

Slowly Jensen pushed further in and Jared bucked up to meet him, arched his back and took Jensen's cock all the way in until Jensen's balls were flush against his ass. Jared was sweating, hair stuck to his nape. Jensen kissed him where his neck met his shoulder. "Okay?"

"I'm okay," Jared said. His voice was muffled by the comforter but it was clear enough.

Jensen began to move, shallow rolling of his hips at first, until Jared said, "Harder, c'mon." Jensen complied, fucked him hard and fast until Jared's back was slick with sweat. He was rocking up to meet Jensen's thrusts and Jensen had to be doing something right, because Jared was letting loose with a string of gibberish, "FuckharderJensenmore." They had a good rhythm going, Jensen pulling out part of the way and pushing back in and Jared grinding down into the bed.

Jensen shoved a hand between Jared's body and the mattress and found Jared's cock. There wasn't much he could do with the angle and the press of Jared's body down, but it didn't seem to matter. Another string of curses and Jared came hot and wet on the mattress, all over Jensen's hand.

Jensen pulled his hand out from under Jared and braced again, but on the next downstroke Jared clenched his muscles around Jensen's cock, rode him hard and up, and that was it: Jensen groaned and came hard before collapsing boneless onto Jared's back.

Jared let him lay there for a while, twisting to catch Jensen in a kiss that was more them panting into each others' mouths than anything else. Finally Jared said, "Okay, dude, you're going to have to move. You're kind of heavy."

"Hey." Jensen swatted at him lazily, but he pulled out and rolled off Jared's back.

Jared inhaled sharply. "I'm fine," he said before Jensen could ask. "It's cool."

"You sure?" Jensen asked, turning towards Jared.

"Yes. Shit, yes." Jared smiled hugely and kissed Jensen on the mouth. Jensen kissed back for a few seconds then started to roll off the bed.

"Hey." Jared grabbed him by the arm. "What're you doing?"

Jensen held up the tied-off condom. "I was going to go get rid of this. And then I was going to head out."

"Head out?" Jared asked. "How come?"

 _Because that's what we always do_ , Jensen was about to say, but then he didn't. There was something in Jared's face that made him hesitate. Instead he said cautiously, "Should I not?"

Jared snorted. "Dude, what's the point of a no-school day if we can't sleep in and have lazy morning sex? Get back over here."

Jensen could feel himself grinning like a fool. He didn't care.

"Ugh, but yeah, get rid of the condom first," Jared said, wrinkling his nose.

"Stop being such a freaking girl," Jensen countered, dumping it in the trashcan.

"We'll see who you're calling a girl when _you're_ taking it up the ass," Jared replied, grinning, and God damn, Jensen had come maybe five minutes ago, but his cock twitched a little anyway.

"Ha." Jared smirked when Jensen failed to come up with a comeback. Jared shifted around on the bed and shoved the dirty bedspread to the floor, then said, "Hey, c'mere."

Jensen laid down beside him so that they were facing each other, pulled him closer and kissed him, hand on Jensen's jaw. They stayed like that, kissed for a long time, maybe forever; Jensen would have been all right with it if it was forever. Sometime after that he fell asleep with his head resting on Jared's arm, Jared whispering, " _Jensen, Jensen, Jensen_ ," into his ear.

*

The alarm didn't go off on Tuesday, but Jared woke up at five-thirty anyway. The force of habit, he figured, except that there was a pair of legs tangled up with his own and Jensen's face was mushed against his shoulder. He and Jensen had had sex last night. Not that what they'd been doing before hadn't been sex, but there was a difference between handjobs and blowjobs and going all the way -- _going all the way?_ Clearly he spent too much time around middle schoolers. -- and anyway, they'd done it last night.

If there were ever a point at which he was supposed to freak out, Jared thought, it was now. Less than two weeks ago he'd been completely certain that he was straight. Less than eight hours ago, he'd had another man's cock up his ass. That was definitely supposed to freak him out. Looking at Jensen, though, he didn't feel like freaking out. Instead there was a thrill in his stomach that they'd done this, actually done it, and he had the urge to slide his fingers through Jensen's sleep-mussed hair and kiss him awake.

But Jensen looked so content asleep that Jared let him be, and tried instead to count the freckles on his face. There were hundreds of them, maybe millions. Jared thought he saw the constellation Cassiopeia high on Jensen's left cheek, beneath his eye, and there was a lightness in his chest at being allowed this, being able to watch Jensen sleeping.

Jared tucked his head back down next to Jensen's and tried to go back to sleep. He couldn't do it, though. For whatever reason, he was awake, and he was hungry.

Well, no wonder there: he hadn't eaten dinner last night. He'd been too busy having sex with Jensen to remember about dinner, and that had to be a first in the history of his life, actually _forgetting_ about food. Now that he thought about it, though, he was _starving_ , and so he carefully disentangled his legs from Jensen's and got up, picking last night's boxers off of the floor and pulling them on.

Jared started a pot of coffee and poured himself a big bowl of cereal. The newspaper would be here already, if he wanted to go get it, but then he remembered that he hadn't checked his email since yesterday afternoon. He finished most of his cereal while waiting for his laptop to boot up, then loaded Firefox.

There were a dozen messages in his inbox, most of them work-related: there was a faculty meeting on Thursday after school, and a fire drill was scheduled for next Monday, third period. Awesome. He might as well go ahead and write off getting anything done with the eighth graders right now. At least it was the eighth graders, though, and not one of the seventh grade classes; this way the seventh graders would all stay on the same schedule.

There were a couple of emails from his parents and one from his sister, too. He scanned the subject headers but none of them seemed urgent, so he figured he'd save those for last and take his time answering them. Everything else seemed to be junk mail, stuff that snuck through no matter how high he set the filters; that was, unless it was Chad sending out the penis enlargement emails. Chad did that sometimes. He thought it was freaking hilarious. It probably was, if you were eight years old, or Chad.

Jared was going right down the line and deleting all of the junk messages without bothering to open them when one of them caught his eye. "In town" was the subject header, and the sender was lakersgirl79@hotmail.com. He didn't know why he didn't just delete it along with the rest, but for whatever reason he double-clicked on it and read:

_I'm at the Inns of Pembroke, on E. Railroad Street, Room 102. Come by as soon as you get this, no need to write back. It doesn't matter what time it is. Can't wait to see you again._

_Sandy_

It took Jared a minute to even realize what he'd just read. _Sandy_. It had been two months since the end of the cruise. She'd said it would be a while before she'd be able to contact him, but she'd kept her word; two months wasn't really that long to wait, and she'd gotten in touch with him. Not only that, she was _here_. She was in Pembroke. Jared had no idea how he was supposed to react to that. Two months ago he'd been so certain that she was the only person he'd ever want, but he hadn't had any idea, two months ago, that he was going to meet Jensen. He tried to compare how he'd felt about Sandy on the cruise with how he felt about Jensen now and he couldn't even do it. There was no comparison. Because Sandy, she'd been great, he'd loved the way she'd fit against him, the smallness of her hands in his, but she wasn't Jensen, not even close.

When he'd thought about how their reunion would play out two months ago, Jared had had all sorts of plans for it: the way he would pull her close to him, the way he would tell her he'd missed her and then kiss her breathless. He hadn't ever thought to come up with a plan for how he would tell her he was sorry she'd come all the way to Georgia to see him, but he was in love with someone else.

In love with someone else. Jared's breath hitched. He hadn't thought about it before, but now that he had he knew it was true: he was in love with Jensen. Jared was in love with him. He'd known it before, on some level -- he must have known it as soon as he'd figured out that Sandy couldn't really be the one for him -- but he'd never _thought_ it before.

He was in love with Jensen.

Jared finished the last of his cereal and drained the milk out of the bottom of the bowl. He was going to have to go talk to Sandy at some point, he knew. He just needed to talk to Jensen about it first. This whole thing between them might have been new, but he was pretty much positive that not telling Jensen about the girl he'd thought he was going to marry and then going off to meet her at a hotel would be a very bad idea.

It was fine. He'd just wait until Jensen woke up, and then he'd explain the whole thing, and maybe Jensen could help him figure out what he was going to tell Sandy, because really, he was in uncharted territory here. He figured Jensen probably didn't have any better idea than he did, but a second opinion couldn't hurt.

Jared turned to get up and maybe get a second bowl of cereal, when he saw Jensen standing in the doorway. He was wearing a pair of Jared's sweatpants and his hair was sticking up everywhere and Jared was so in love with him that it hurt.

"Hey," Jensen said. "I was wondering where you'd gone off to."

"I woke up early, couldn't get back to sleep," Jared said. "I didn't want to wake you up."

"Why not?"

Jared laughed. "You looked like you were out for the count, man. I didn't want to mess with that."

Jensen got a funny look on his face, and for a moment Jared was scared about what that could mean. Because yeah, Jared was the one who'd had a dick up his ass, but Jensen was the one who'd put it there. Jared didn't have a monopoly on the right to freak out, and he hadn't even considered what would happen if Jensen freaked, but now he was starting to consider.

Except then Jensen walked up behind him, snaked his hand around Jared's neck and tilted his head up for a kiss, curling his tongue around Jared's, which laid that fear to rest pretty fast.

Jensen pulled back a little, smiling against his lips. "Morning."

Jared kissed him again, but there were too many thoughts in his head to be able to concentrate just on the kiss: Jensen wasn't freaking out and Jared was in love with him and Sandy was in town.

It seemed so stupid now, the whole thing with Sandy. It seemed like such a waste. Because yeah, she was a great girl, and in another lifetime she might really have been the one for him, but that would have to be a lifetime that didn't involve Jensen, and Jared hated the thought of it.

"Hey," Jared said softly when Jensen finally pulled back.

"Hey yourself," Jensen replied. "What've you been up to?" He nodded at the laptop.

"Just checking my email," Jared said. He almost left it at that, but he couldn't. The Sandy thing had to come out. It was going to sound bad no matter how he did it, and he really wished he didn't have to do this now. Her timing was pretty crappy, but then when would it _not_ have been crappy? He had to tell Jensen about her, and he had to do it now, because afterwards he was going to have to go to her hotel and explain to _her_ about _Jensen._ The idea of it made his head hurt, but the sooner he started the sooner the whole thing would be over.

It would all work out, anyway. Jared was sure it would.

Jared swallowed and pitched his tone towards casual. "Funny thing, though. I got this email from a girl I met a while back."

"Yeah?" Jensen said. There was the slightest hint of strain in his voice; Jared didn't think he was imagining it. Fuck. He'd barely even started, and already he was making a mess of things.

There was nothing for it, though, but to explain the whole thing, so Jared pressed on. "Yeah. She and I were real tight for a while there. Like, real tight. I spent a long time thinking I was going to marry her."

Jared definitely wasn't imagining the strain in Jensen's voice. "What happened?" he asked.

"You did," Jared said. He smiled at Jensen, tried to convey everything he felt for him in that smile, but he was pretty sure a lot of it got lost between the thought and the action, because Jensen's answering smile didn't reach his eyes. "I really thought she was it for me, but I was wrong. The only thing is, I haven't actually told her that yet--"

"What do you mean, you haven't told her that yet?" Jensen interrupted.

"I haven't heard from her in a couple of months, but she's in town, and I need to--"

Jensen's whole body was strung wire-tight. "What's her name?"

There was something weird about Jensen's reactions, his body language. Jared couldn't make sense of it. "Sandy," he said slowly. "Sandy McCoy."

Just like that Jensen was up and moving. He was halfway out the door before Jared could even say, "Wait, what's going on?"

Jensen turned, his expression unreadable. "I've got to go."

"What do you mean, you've got to go?" Jared snapped, confused. "Jensen, look, I told you--"

"It's not about you," Jensen said, mouth twisting down. "Look, whatever happens here, I'm sorry, okay?"

Jared just stared at him. "You're sorry? What do you mean, you're--"

But Jensen was already out the door.

 


	5. Chapter 5

Jared couldn't for the life of him figure out what had just happened. He’d known there was a chance Jensen wouldn’t take it well, but he hadn’t had any idea it would go down like that. It didn’t even make _sense_ , how quickly it had gone downhill. He’d tried to make it clear that it wasn’t Sandy he wanted, it was Jensen, but that must have gotten lost somewhere between his words and Jensen’s brain, because there was no way Jensen would have run off like that if he’d understood what Jared had meant, right?  
  
The whole thing was throwing Jared so hard that it took him a couple of minutes to figure out that he should just go after Jensen, to try to make him understand what was going on. But when Jared went outside he saw that Jensen’s car was already gone. He must have run right back over to his house and gotten in the car; he couldn’t have even had time to change out of Jared’s sweatpants.  
  
Jared tried his cell phone next, but Jensen didn’t answer. God, he’d really gone and fucked this one up. Jared hadn’t had any idea it was possible to screw up so badly. Maybe he should have expected something like this. Everything with Jensen had been so easy so far; something like this had been bound to happen. But no, he didn’t actually think that.  
  
It just didn’t make sense. That was the thing he kept coming back to. The whole thing didn’t make a damned bit of sense, and if Jensen wasn’t going to answer his phone, Jared didn’t know what he was supposed to do. Wait until Jensen came back? Who the fuck knew how long _that_ would be, though?

And then there was Sandy. _Come as soon as you get this,_ she'd written. _It doesn't matter what time._ She was so excited at the prospect of seeing him again -- and oh, didn't _that_ make him feel awesome. He'd gone and fucked things up with Jensen, and now he got to go be a jerk to Sandy, too. Because while he'd done a really crappy job of presenting the idea of Sandy to Jensen, he didn't have a chance in hell of making "I'm in love with someone else" go down well with Sandy, and he knew it.

For a day that had started out so well, today sure was taking a hard right turn towards shitty. He had to follow through with it all, though. He had to go talk to Sandy and then he had to figure out what the heck he was going to do about Jensen.

First, though, he really needed to take a shower.

It was the right choice. Everything seemed a little better after Jared got in the shower, the water easing some of the tension of out his muscles. He got dressed quickly and headed back into the T.V. room, drained his abandoned cup of coffee, now cold, and tried to convince himself that there was some way to explain this whole thing to Sandy that wouldn't lead to her hating him. He was getting his optimism back, even. The coffee was helping. Five minutes after the caffeine hit, he'd nearly gotten himself convinced that he and Sandy could come out of this as friends. Everything was looking _better_ , at least, if not good. Probably everything would end up being all right.

And then the doorbell rang.

 _It's not Jensen_ , Jared told himself firmly. _It's not going to be Jensen_.

Jared couldn't help hoping it would be him, anyway, but he had to at least tell himself that it wasn't him. Otherwise, if it wasn't, Jared didn't think he'd be able to handle it.

He put the empty coffee cup down and opened the door. There were two policemen standing on his doorstep. One of them was holding up his badge.

"Jared Padalecki?" said the other one. "You're under arrest. Please come with us."

*

Jared spent the whole ride to the police station hyperventilating. He had no freaking idea what was going on. He reported all of his earnings to the IRS. He paid his rent on time. He didn't drive after he'd had more than three beers, and he fed his dogs twice a day, more often if they whined. He'd shoplifted a Snickers bar from the grocery store once, when he was five, but he was pretty sure that a nineteen-year-old candy bar shoplifting charge couldn't have followed him all the way from Texas.

But short of that, Jared didn't have a clue what was going on here. He'd nearly puked up his breakfast when the police handcuffed him, and he nearly did it again when they marched him into the police station. He'd driven by the place dozens of times, but it had always seemed hypothetical, never somewhere he would actually go into, short of his car getting stolen or something, but it was Pembroke; he didn't think cars _got_ stolen here.

And Jared was only getting more confused now that he was inside the station, not to mention scared shitless. The police had parked him in a tiny room on the second floor with a window that opened over the parking lot. They'd uncuffed his left wrist and chained him to the desk, and then they'd left. They hadn't said when they were coming back. That was making the whole thing worse, which he was sure was the point -- to mess with his head.

There was a clock high on the wall above the door, which had the loudest, slowest-moving second hand in the _world_. It took the better part of a year for an hour to tick past, then another. Around ten-thirty the doorknob finally turned, but it just turned out to be a secretary, a middle-aged woman in a skirt-suit. "I thought you might be thirsty," she said, handing him a bottle of water.

Jared appreciated it, really he did. It was starting to get kind of hot in the room, now that the sun was higher in the sky and beginning to angle through the window, and the A.C. unit was ancient, puttering half-heartedly. Jared thanked the secretary for the water, but she couldn't or wouldn't tell him what the police wanted with him.

Around eleven-fifteen the A.C. crapped out entirely. It was hot as fuck in the room, and Jared had drained the bottle of water ages ago. The sharp edge of his panic had worn off around the same time he'd finished the water, though, giving way to excruciating boredom. He was trying to make pictures out of the water stains on the walls. So far he'd found a tiger, Argentina and the Olsen twins, and he was trying to invent a story that involved all three and maybe James Bond, too, when the door opened again and revealed a cop, followed by Jensen.

Jared's mouth was going before he could even think about it. "Jensen, man, I'm so sorry about what happened before, you've got to believe me, and--"

Jensen wasn't wearing Jared's sweatpants anymore. That was the first thing that registered. He was wearing a suit and a tie. The second thing was that Jensen's body language was all weird, rigid and authoritative and like nothing Jared had ever seen from him before. Third: Jensen was following a guy into the room who couldn't possibly be anything but a cop. Maybe Jensen was here because he'd heard Jared had gotten arrested, but seeing as Jared hadn't been at the police station for more than a few hours and hadn't so much as officially been charged with anything, Jared was pretty sure that wasn't it.

The suit, the body language, the fact he was here at all . . . Whatever the police wanted Jared for, the probably didn't want Jensen for it, too, not if he was standing on the far side of the table and looking distinctly not handcuffed. So what did that make Jensen, then? A cop?

Definitely not a computer programmer.

The neurons in Jared's brain were firing, but clearly they weren't firing fast enough, because the other guy's first question caught Jared completely off-guard.

"How long have you known Sandy McCoy?"

*

An hour later, Jared still wasn't any less confused. The cop had grilled him about everything he could possibly know about Sandy, right down to what she'd had for dinner when they'd eaten together on the cruise, but he'd point-blank refused to answer when Jared asked what the police wanted with him and Sandy.

More than once Jared thought to appeal to Jensen, to ask him what the fuck was going on and what _his_ role in this was, but every time Jared looked at him Jensen's face was completely devoid of emotion, as if he'd been replaced by a robot. To further back up this theory, it was about eighty bazillion degrees in the room, and Jared was _dripping_ ; Jensen, on the other hand, wasn't so much as breaking a sweat. And Jared knew Jensen sweated. Jensen sweated a whole lot, actually: when they were running, when they'd been drinking on a hot night, when they were fucking . . .

This couldn't be Jensen. That was the only explanation for it. This was RoboJensen, or a body snatcher or something, but it wasn't him. Jared kept hoping Jensen would shift a little so Jared could catch the robotic flash of his eyes and confirm his theory, but so far he wasn't having any luck.

Jared was pretty sure that the other cop was human, since he was sweating almost as much as Jared was, but he couldn't be sure. And the questions just kept on coming. The guy wanted to know if Jared had ever seen Sandy going into a cabin that wasn't her own or his, if he'd seen her carrying any packages around, who he'd seen her speaking to . . . His head was swimming, and he didn't have any idea why they wanted to know all of this.

Finally, sometime after one, the cop turned to RoboJensen and said, "Let's take a break. We'll be back."

Jared wasn't looking forward to it. After they left the room, though, the secretary came back with a second bottle of water, which Jared drained before condensation really had time to gather on the outside. And then he settled in to wait.

Jared wasn't watching the clock this time; he didn't want to know how slowly time was passing. It couldn't have been long, though -- fifteen minutes, maybe twenty -- before the door opened again.

It was just Jensen this time. He still wasn't sweating, but there were cracks in the robot face, some small form of proof that it was all an act. But when he opened his mouth, it was one hundred percent Not Jensen.

"I'm sorry about how much of an inconvenience today must have been," he said, uncuffing Jared's wrist from the desk. "But you're free to go at any time."

Jared rubbed at his wrist and gaped. "Sorry about the -- free to go?" he spluttered. "Jensen, what are you talking about? What the fuck is going on? What do you want with Sandy?"

Just like that, the RoboJensen mask was firmly back in place. "I'm sorry, I can't tell you that."

"What do you mean by that?" Jared was beginning to feel like a broken record, but he really didn't care.

"I mean, I can't tell you," RoboJensen repeated. Even his voice was mechanical.

"Can't or won't?" Jared asked, standing up. He had a good three inches on Jensen, at least, but then again this was RoboJensen; he didn't back down.

"Can't."

"So what, you're acting under orders here?" Jared said tightly.

Suddenly regular Jensen was back, looking more tired and stressed than Jared had ever seen him before. "I can't tell you. Look, just go home, Jared. There's no reason for you to stick around here any longer than you have to."

Jared kept his eyes locked on Jensen. "There is, if it means you'll tell me what's going on."

"I'm not going to. Look, Jared, I'm sorry about this, I really am, but the best thing you can do is just go home and forget this whole thing ever happened."

"Forget this whole thing ever happened?" Jared snapped. "How do you want me to do that?"

"I don't know," Jensen said, voice rough. "I'm sorry." He turned and walked out of the room, leaving the door open behind him.

Jared just stared at the doorway stupidly for a minute before he went after Jensen. By the time he got into the hallway, though, Jensen was nowhere to be seen.

*

An unmarked cop car dropped Jared back off at his house at a little after two in the afternoon. Harley and Sadie slobbered all over him at the door, and everything else inside was just as he'd left it, but Jared was still reeling. He felt like he might vomit any minute.

The first thing he did, once he got his bearings, was call the hotel. "Room 102, please."

"That room is currently unoccupied, sir," said the receptionist. "Are you sure you have the correct number?"

"Unoccupied?" Jared repeated. He had a sinking feeling in his chest. He hadn't read the email again, but 102 was the right number, he was sure of it. "Can you tell me what room Sandy McCoy is in, then?"

He could hear the receptionist tapping at a keyboard. "I'm sorry, sir, but there's no record of anyone by that name in our system."

So what, then? She hadn't been at that hotel at all? But that didn't make any sense. Why would she have sent him to the wrong hotel?

Unless . . . Unless Sandy wasn't behind this at all. What if Sandy _had_ been there, and the cops had already found her. Jared didn't even know what they could possibly want with her, but what if they'd arrested her and erased her name from the hotel system, then told the hotel clerks to say that she'd never been there at all?

"Sir?" the receptionist said.

Jared realized he'd been silent too long. "Uh, sorry. I must have had the wrong hotel. Thanks for your help," he said, then hung up.

Jared felt a little like he was dealing with the Men in Black, here, as though they were coming through and erasing any trace of what was going on. The next thing he did was to try calling Jensen again. It didn't surprise him that Jensen didn't pick up.

*

If Jared had felt like he was dealing with the Men in Black before, that feeling only intensified the next evening when a U-Haul parked next door and two men in cover-alls started lugging about a dozen computer monitors out of Jensen's house.

Jared tried calling Jensen again first; still he didn't pick up. Then Jared went outside and stopped one of the movers, a big guy with a beard full beard. "Uh, what are you doing?"

The guy rolled his eyes. "What does it look like, buddy?"

Jared ignored him. "Why are you guys doing this without Jensen here?"

"Who?" The guy stared at him blankly.

"The guy who lives here," Jared said, pushing down the urge to roll his own eyes.

"He doesn't live here anymore," the guy said. "We just got told that whoever used to live here needed to leave all of a sudden, didn't even have time to pack up his stuff, so we were supposed to do it for him."

"Where are you taking everything?" Jared asked.

It was just like dealing with RoboJensen: the guy's face went carefully blank. "I can't tell you. Customer privacy and all that," he said evenly. "Have a nice day, now."

 _Customer privacy, my ass,_ Jared thought. "You too," he replied, turning back towards the house.

There was no way those guys were regular movers, no matter how at home they looked in their cover-alls.

*  
It kind of threw Jared for a minute when he checked his email later that night and saw that Sandy's message was gone from his inbox. It wasn't in his deleted messages, either, though he'd been sure from the start that he hadn't deleted it.

So when he tried Jensen's cell phone again a little while later, he wasn't entirely surprised to hear a pre-recorded message in a woman's tinny voice: _We're sorry. The number you have dialed has been disconnected._

Definitely the Men in Black. Jared was just waiting for Will Smith to show up with that little silver memory zapper and tell him that everything he'd seen hadn't happened at all.

He was off-kilter for the rest of the week, doing his best to convince himself that the whole thing hadn't happened at all. He woke up in the mornings thinking he'd go outside and Jensen would be there and they could go run like they used to, come back and make out and get each other off-- It took a few seconds for him to remember that Jensen was gone, completely unreachable, and apparently some kind of cop or robot or secret agent, maybe all three at once.

It was surreal. This wasn't the sort of thing that was supposed to happen in Jared's life. He was a middle school English teacher in Pembroke, Georgia. The weirdest thing that was supposed to happen to him was, he didn't know, catching twelve-year-olds kissing under the soccer bleachers or watching Chad propose to Sophia yet again. He didn't know where the fuck Jensen was, or _who_ he was, if Jensen was even his name at all.

Jared didn't know what had happened to Sandy, either; he felt bad about that, too, but worse that he was spending more time trying to figure out what the fuck was going on with Jensen that worrying about what had become of her. She hadn't been the love of his life, as it turned out, but he'd still cared for her and she'd vanished without a trace. He'd never had any way of contacting her, though, and while he remembered the email address she'd used to send him that message the other day, he wasn't surprised in the least when the message bounced.

Jared didn't have any idea what to do about any of this, so he did the only thing he could think of to do: he tried to convince himself it hadn't happened at all. This wasn't the sort of thing that was supposed to happen to a middle school English teacher; better to tell himself that it just plain hadn't happened, and get on with his life. There was only a week left in the year, and everyone was going crazy at school, trying to make sure that everything got graded and finals got written and kids who'd fallen behind got caught up.

Jared had plenty to concentrate on, and it was fine. Jared stayed long hours after school, tutoring kids and grading things, and when he came home he was too tired to think about much of anything at all, let alone those past two months that hadn't happened.

*

Three days before the end of the school year, Jared was sitting on his couch in front of the T.V., considering just passing out. It was only seven-thirty p.m., but he seriously didn't think he was going to be able to keep his eyes open for much longer. He'd been at school from seven in the morning until six-thirty at night. He'd picked up a couple of bean burritos from Taco Bell on the way back from school, had devoured them before he'd ever reached the house, and he really just wanted to watch baseball for maybe half an hour and go ahead and call it a night.

There wasn't really anything good on, though, so Jared was just channel-surfing absentmindedly. There was a mountain lion special on Animal Planet, something about World War II on the History Channel, music videos on MTV . . . He got down to the low-numbered channels, the news stations. He wasn't really in the mood to watch the news right now, and he was about to flip back up to higher-numbered channels and work his way down again when he hit Fox News, and could have sworn that he heard: " . . . bust of a major drug ring based out of Los Angeles and headed by Sandy McCoy."

It was just the stress, Jared was sure. He couldn't have heard that right. He hadn't been sleeping nearly enough, that was it. But he turned the volume up just as the video of the anchorwoman was replaced with a still photo of Sandy smiling into the camera. "Twenty-seven-year-old Sandy McCoy was the mastermind behind a major cocaine trafficking organization based out of Los Angeles that was busted by the DEA earlier this month," came the anchorwoman's voiceover. "The DEA was able to apprehend McCoy and other members of her organization after weeks of undercover surveillance work based on a 'tenuous lead' that apparently paid off . . . "

 _Holy shit_. That was the only thing Jared could think. _Holy freaking shit_. Sandy was a _cocaine trafficker_. She'd been the head of an _international drug cartel_. When she'd said she had things to take care of before she could be with him he wouldn't in a million years have thought that she was talking about _drugs_.

And Jensen, he had to have been working for the DEA. That was the only thing that made sense. He'd been working for the DEA, he was part of that undercover surveillance the anchorwoman was talking about. He'd been spying on Jared, because Sandy had said she'd contact him. The DEA must have known about that; that must be the 'tenuous lead' they'd mentioned on T.V.

Jesus.

*

Things were crazy enough at school for the next few days as it was, but the whole Sandy and Jensen mess made it even worse. Everyone he knew wanted to discuss it, but Jared didn't have any idea how to even _start_ talking about it. How was he supposed to act when the man you'd been in love with turned out to have been spying on you in order to capture the woman you'd thought you were in love with _before_ , who was coincidentally an _internationally wanted criminal_? It sounded like a soap opera, and it kind of fell outside of the scope of Jared's previous experience.

He didn't really know what he even _could_ do about it, other than keep on pretending everything was fine. Maybe after he got through the end of school he could sit down and think about it, try to figure out what the fuck had happened to his life in the past two and a half months, but for now he just needed to make sure the seventh graders all knew which one was Hermia and which one was Helena and that the eighth graders had actually all read _A Tale of Two Cities_ through to the end. He didn't have time to think about anything else until after the end of school.

Somehow exam week was even worse than usual this year, but Jared made it through. He even got everything graded and turned in on time -- more luck than anything else, along with exceedingly little sleep -- and after he'd gotten through the end of the week and the subsequent three post-planning days, Jared didn't want to do anything but sleep for about a _year_. It was a good exhaustion, though, tiredness brought on by lots of hard work, and he thought that maybe, after all this, the kids in his classes just might have learned something this year. He couldn't be sure of it, but he had hope.

*

It took a couple of days for Jared to catch up on sleep and get to where he actually wanted to see other people again. This was the first year that Jared wasn't going to be working his ass off on his master's over the summer, so sooner or later he was going to have to find a summer job. Kristen bartended at Hart's Tavern now, so he and some of the other teachers went there a couple of times during the first week of the break and she gave them drinks for cheap. She mentioned that the place was hiring, and when you factored in tips the pay wasn't too bad. But seeing as Jared wasn't a tiny cute blonde girl, somehow he figured he probably wouldn't do as well in the tips department. He couldn't really see himself working there, anyway.

Jared couldn't really think of anywhere he wanted to work, though, that was the problem. He kind of looked at jobs for a while, half-heartedly, but nearly a week into the summer he was still hanging out at Chad's house playing Playstation rather than being gainfully employed. Chad had just quit his job at the gas station, so he had plenty of free time as well. Chad claimed his motivation was that he wanted to find something better than pumping gas, and it sounded good, except that he didn't really seem to be trying any harder to find a new job than Jared did at the moment.

Jared didn't really care, honestly. Playstation was more fun with someone else, anyway.

They were playing Madden, and Jared was completely kicking Chad's ass for the third day in a row. It was really kind of embarrassing for Chad at this point, Jared had to admit. Jared was about to score his nineteenth touchdown of the day, and it wasn't even five o'clock yet.

Jared was concentrating on the game, so he only kind of heard it when Chad said, "Sophia said yes."

"Uh-huh." A couple seconds later, the words actually made it all the way into Jared's brain. "Wait, _what?_ " he said, pausing the game to make sure he was hearing this right. "You're freaking kidding me, congratulations, man!"

Chad rolled his eyes. "Dude, seriously? Do you really think I would have been able to keep that quiet about it if she'd actually said yes?"

Jared punched him in the arm. "Asshole. Quit messing with me." Just for that, he picked up the controller before Chad was paying attention again and scored touchdown number nineteen. Not that Chad would have really been able to stop him even if he were holding his controller, but y'know, Jared might've at least given him a fighting chance otherwise, just for the heck of it.

"Hey!" Chad squawked. "Not cool. But hey, Jared, listen to me for a minute here, man. I wasn't really doing that just to mess with you. I didn't know how else to get your attention, you're kind of crazy with the video games right now."

"Mmm-hmm." Jared stuck his tongue out of the side of his mouth in concentration.

"This whole thing, dude," Chad was saying. "You've got to cut it out. It's kind of driving everyone crazy."

"I don't know what you're talking about," Jared said. Man, Chad's offensive line sucked even more than his defense. Jared hadn't known that was _possible_.

"Just freaking pick up the phone already and quit this moping shit," Chad added.

Jared didn't even bother to pause the game. He just stared. "Um, Chad? Sandy's in _jail_. I can't exactly call her."

Chad snorted. "Dude, I'm not a moron. I'm not talking about Sandy."

Jared's stomach flipped. "What do you mean?" he hedged.

Chad met his gaze evenly. "We all know about you and Jensen, dude. The whole running in the morning thing? And hanging out with each other all the time? Not exactly subtle. Everybody's cool with it, but this whole moping around and kicking my ass at Madden shit has got to stop. Just call the guy."

Maybe in a couple of minutes Jared's brain would manage to wrap itself around the entirety of that, but for the moment the only thing he could latch onto was, "I don't have his number."

Chad snorted again. "Seriously? That's the lamest excuse ever. What do you think the internet is for?"

*

It turned out that that Jensen really was his name, and that Googling it actually did produce a telephone number. Jared spent two days being too chickenshit to call, because what in the world could he possibly say? _I realize this whole thing was a big fat mess but I'm still in love with you and do you think we could maybe get back together?_ He didn't have the slightest idea. Finally, on the Saturday a week after school let out, Jared bit the bullet and dialed.

"DEA Los Angeles branch, how may I help you?" said the woman on the other end of the line.

Jared swallowed compulsively. "I'm, uh. Trying to reach Jensen Ackles. Is he around?"

"I'm sorry, he's out of the office for an indefinite period at the moment. If you'd like, I can connect you to his voice mail."

"No," Jared said, "that's okay, but thanks anyway," and hung up before he changed his mind, because leaving a message on Jensen's answering machine was about the worst idea in the _world._

*

Now that school was out, Saturday didn't really feel any different than any other day of the week, but it was still Jared's day to call home. He'd already talked to his parents about the whole Sandy deal -- they'd heard all about it on the news, too -- but he still wasn't looking forward to all of his mother's questions, all of her worrying and trying to make sure he was all right.

It wasn't as bad as it could have been, though. His mom seemed to sense that he didn't really want to discuss the Sandy thing anymore, so she was doing most of the talking, describing the work they were planning on doing on the house over summer. Jeff was apparently planning on being in San Antonio for a while, and they were all hoping Jared could come down there, but at any rate, they were definitely going to be redoing the downstairs bathroom . . .

Jared just let her voice wash over him, occasionally punctuated by his dad's 'uh-huh's of agreement. He could feel tension he hadn't even know he had easing out of his shoulders, and he was starting to relax, sinking lower into the couch, when the doorbell rang.

"Sorry, guys, let me go get that," Jared said, putting the phone down. Harley and Sadie were already at the door, scratching and yowling. Jared pushed past them to open the door. "Sorry about that," was already on his lips before he even got the door all the way open, and then he looked at who was outside and completely forgot how to breathe.

"Hi," Jensen said.

"Hi," Jared replied, stepping out of the doorway and closing the door behind him. He couldn't stop staring. Jensen was wearing jeans and a t-shirt and that same hat he'd been wearing the first time Jared had met him, the Rams baseball cap, and he looked like he wanted to run away any second. He pulled the baseball cap off and fidgeted with its fraying edges.

"I, uh," Jensen began, then swallowed. "I figured I kind of owed you an apology."

Jared nodded. He wasn't sure he could trust himself to speak.

"I fucked up," Jensen said. "I should've leveled with you from the start. I should've told you what was going on with Sandy McCoy, should've told you why I was here. There wasn't any reason to keep you in the dark. I had to be sure you weren't an accomplice of McCoy's, but I was sure of that after about a day. I just--" Jensen pushed a hand through his hair. "We got to be friends, right, and I didn't know how to tell you about it without fucking things up, and then the other stuff happened--"

"'The other stuff'?" Jared cut in, raising his eyebrows.

Jensen flushed. "Yeah," he said quietly. "And I -- I didn't know what I was doing, flying by the seat of my pants, and well. I tried to get out of here when I first figured it out. About you and me, I mean."

Jared didn't think he'd ever heard Jensen string so many words together in a row, and he was still going: "I kind of forgot about the whole thing for a while, if you can believe it, forgot what I was supposed to be doing here. I _forgot_ about the case. But after you kissed me" -- Jensen flushed; Jared did, too, at the memory of it -- "I knew I had to tell you. And I was going to, really I was, but Sandy got her act together faster than I did, I guess." Jensen's tone was rueful. "I know it sounds like a good excuse, blaming it on Sandy. I had well over a month to tell you and I didn't, but I mean it, Jared: I didn't mean to keep you in the dark. I just didn't want to fuck things up, and I know I did anyway, and that this is all probably too little, too late, but I thought I owed you an apology at least. So yeah, I'm sorry."

Jared just stared at him for a while, trying to take it all in. He didn't have the slightest idea of how to start replying to that, and when he opened his mouth his voice felt rusty, out of use. "After you left, I tried to tell myself it didn't happen. The whole thing, I mean. It must've been something I dreamed up to keep myself entertained, y'know? You, Sandy, all of it. This kind of thing doesn't actually _happen_ in real life. Hell, what am I saying, maybe it happens in your life all the time."

"No," Jensen said quietly. "No, it doesn't."

Jared ignored him. He was surprised to find that he was _angry_ at Jensen, seriously angry. He didn't even know where the anger was coming from; from everything all at once, probably. He had no idea. It didn't matter. "Do you really think you can do shit like that?" he asked. "Do you actually think you can lie to me for two months and then show back up, what, once it's convenient for you? You're back because the job's over now, and you just expect everything to be okay?"

Jared had scored a hit with that one, he could tell by the way Jensen paled. "Jared, I'm--"

"You're what? You're sorry?" Jared was having trouble controlling the volume of his voice; he was most of the way to yelling. "You can't fucking _do_ this, Jensen!"

Jared had no idea what was showing on his face that would have made Jensen want to step towards him rather than away, but that was what Jensen did, grabbing Jared by the upper arms. "Hey," Jensen said, looking him straight in the eyes. "I'm _sorry_ , Jared. God, I'm sorry. I fucked up, man, and I know it. Just -- can you give me another chance? You gotta give me another chance. I kept trying to tell myself to let it go, that I'd fucked things up too badly to fix, but I couldn't do it. I couldn't let you go without at least trying, at least. Please, Jared."

Hearing Jensen say his name was what did it. Jared thought about the two months Jensen had lived next door, all those opportunities he'd had to come clean. "You lied to me," Jared said.

"Only about the case," Jensen said miserably. "Never about anything else. What happened with you and me -- I wasn't lying there. I didn't want it to happen at all, y'know? It would have been so much easier if it hadn't."

"Do you wish it hadn't happened?" Jared asked before he had the chance to think about it. He wasn't sure he really wanted to know the answer, but it was too late: the question was out there now.

Jensen wasn't looking at Jared. "No," he said, almost too quietly to hear. Then, more firmly, "No, I don't wish it hadn't happened. I can't." He met Jared's eyes again. "I'm in love with you, Jared. And I can tell myself I didn't mean for this to happen as long as I want, but that doesn't stop me being in love with you, and I don't even know what to do about it, but I had to at least come back and try--"

Jared thought about a month of friendship, about that miserable week of avoiding each other with the kiss in the middle, and then the ten days that had come after, those ten perfect days . . . He thought about the feeling he'd had, once, before he and Jensen had figured out what they really wanted: that feeling that he'd known Jensen forever already, and that he wanted to keep knowing him for the rest of his life.

"Yeah," Jared said. "Yeah, me too."

Jensen must've known exactly what he meant: his face crumpled into relief. "I missed you," he said, digging his fingers deeper into Jared's arms and leaning forwards.

Jared was still angry as all hell, and things with him and Jensen weren't all right, not yet. But as Jensen's lips closed over his and Jensen exhaled into his mouth, Jared was certain that eventually they would be.

**the end**


End file.
